In the past year, Google has worked to surface timely and reliable health information, amplify public health campaigns, and help nonprofits get urgent support to Indians in need. Now, we are continuing to focus on helping India’s businesses accelerate their digital transformation, deepening our commitment to India’s digitization and economic recovery. To support customers and the public sector in India and across Asia Pacific, we’re excited to announce that our new Google Cloud region in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) is now open. 

Designed to help both Indian and global companies alike build highly available applications for their customers, the Delhi NCR region is our second Google Cloud region in India and 10th to open in Asia Pacific. 

What customers and partners are saying

Navigating this past year has been a challenge for companies as they grapple with changing customers demands and economic uncertainty. Technology has played a critical role, and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions around the world to help them adapt. The Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will help our customers adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working, like we’ve helped so many companies do in the region: 

• InMobi scaled a personalized AI platform to support 120+ million active users. “With the arrival of the Google Cloud Delhi NCR, InMobi Group sees the opportunity to continue closing the gap between our users and products,” says Mohit Saxena, Co-founder and Group CTO of Inmobi. “Glance, especially, has been serving AI-powered personalised content to over 120 million active users. We can’t wait to continue giving them truly meaningful experiences that are speedy, scale well, and are relevant to them, by expanding the use of our current tools working on Google Cloud with the opening of a new region.”
• Groww now supports a sizable user base. “Google Cloud provides great technology that enables us to build and scale infrastructure to millions of users, and the new Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will continue to help more businesses and startups in India access powerful cloud-based infrastructure, products and services,” says Neeraj Singh, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Groww.
• HDFC Bank is positioned for the future. “At HDFC Bank, we are harnessing technology platforms to both run and build the bank. As we progress to be future ready, the objective is to invest in future technologies that give us scale, efficiency and resiliency. Towards this the Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will enable us to enhance our resiliency and help us in building an active-active design framework for our new generation applications on cloud,” says Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, CIO, HDFC Bank.  
• Dr. Reddy’s Lab built a modern data platform with Google Cloud. “At Dr Reddy’s, we pride ourselves in helping patients regain good health, acting quickly to provide innovative solutions to address patients’ unmet needs and in accelerating access to medicines to people worldwide. Our Google Cloud-powered data platform is helping us realize these objectives and we welcome Google’s investment in the new Delhi NCR region as helping us and other businesses in India make further contributions to our social and economic future,” says Mukesh Rathi, Senior Vice President & CIO, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories.
• “To survive the disruption caused by the pandemic and to succeed in the long term, organizations need to become digital natives, so they can be more agile, explore new business models and build new capabilities that boost resilience. A cloud-first strategy plays a key role in enabling businesses to do this,” said Piyush N. Singh, Lead – India market unit & lead – Growth and Strategic Client Relationships, Asia Pacific and Latin America, Accenture. “Harnessing the potential of cloud requires the right data infrastructure and this expansion by Google Cloud will undoubtedly help Indian enterprises in their digital transformation journeys.”

A global network of regions

Delhi NCR joins 25 existing Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. As the second region in India, customers benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty.

With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in India also benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data. Designed for high availability, the region opens with three availability zones to protect against service disruptions, and offers a portfolio of key products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery. 

Supporting India’s recovery with training and education

Google and Google Cloud will also continue to support our customers with people and education programs. We’re investing in local talent and the local developer community to help enterprises digitally transform and support economic recovery. 

Through the India Digitization Fund, we expanded our efforts to support India’s recovery from COVID-19—in particular, through programs to support education and small businesses. In addition to expanding internet access, and investments to help start-ups accelerate India’s digital transformation, we’ve grown our Grow with Google efforts. Businesses can access digital tools to maintain business continuity, find resources like quick help videos, and learn digital skills—in both English and in Hindi.

Helping customers build their transformation clouds

Google Cloud is here to support businesses, helping them get smarter with data, deploy faster, connect more easily with people and customers throughout the globe, and protect everything that matters to their businesses. The cloud region in Delhi NCR offers new technology and tools that can be a catalyst for this change. To learn more, visit the Google Cloud locations page, and be sure to watch the region launch event here.

Digital transformation is now a strategic imperative for organizations across every industry. For governments and regulated businesses, moving services to the cloud poses a unique set of challenges.

As a vital enabler of transformation, the cloud can unlock innovation and help keep pace with the accelerating pace of digital business. Unfortunately, many government agencies and firms in regulated industries don’t have the luxury of adopting new systems at will. They must deal with issues such as limited resources, lack of digital skills, and siloed operations. However, they also face cloud-specific challenges, including: 

• Data sovereignty: Regulated industries and the public sector often have concerns about the location of data, how it is protected, who else can access it, and whether it is stored in a secure location.
• Compliance: Government agencies and regulated businesses must ensure that their data and cloud use are compliant with all applicable government requirements, privacy and data protection laws, and other regulations.
• Security: Compliance is a natural component of any strong approach to security. As a result, government regulations and industry standards mandate a responsibility to secure and protect data from unauthorized access or use. 
• Cost: Every organization wants to ensure it’s getting good value for their money when using cloud computing, but especially government agencies that are more likely to be working with fixed budgets and fewer resources. 

To address the unique requirements of governments and other highly regulated organizations, some cloud providers have built separate government clouds (“GovClouds”) that run in specialized, stand-alone data centers that make it easier to meet specific requirements around data residency, personnel controls, and other government standards. However, isolated GovCloud environments come with limitations: They can restrict the ability to integrate regulated data with data from other sources, they create siloed infrastructure that can slow down access to new features and technologies, and they usually require more resources to manage and maintain, which translates into higher costs for end-users of GovCloud services.

But what if you could get the features of a government cloud — the certifications and strict controls on data residency and personnel access — on a commercial cloud? 

This is where Assured Workloads comes in. Assured Workloads is a unique Google Cloud service that allows governments and organizations from regulated industries to meet stringent compliance requirements at scale on commercial cloud infrastructure. 

What is Assured Workloads?

Assured Workloads provides a set of security controls and guardrails you can apply to your cloud environments, making it easier to achieve compliance while maintaining the advantages of a full commercial cloud. It includes features like data residency controls for specific compliance types, data and personnel access controls, and real-time monitoring for compliance violations to ensure you implement and maintain the cloud controls required by your compliance regimes. 

Check out our Best Kept Security Secrets series

• Tap into the power of Organization Policy Service
• How VPC Service Controls can help build defense in depth
• How Cloud EKM can help resolve the cloud trust paradox

Assured Workloads can make it easier for agencies and businesses in regulated sectors to meet compliance requirements by providing: 

• A secure and compliant environment: With Assured Workloads, you can create controlled environments for your regulated workloads and automatically enforce data location and resource deployment. It’s designed for customers that need to meet strict security and compliance requirements, such as the government, healthcare, and financial services sectors. 
• Broad security capabilities: Assured Workloads provides comprehensive security for your regulated workloads. Data is encrypted at rest and in transit by default and includes additional features, such as encryption key management according to your compliance regime and Identity and Access Management (IAM) for authentication, authorization, and user access management. 
• Support for multiple compliance frameworks: Assured Workloads is designed to create regulated boundaries on public cloud infrastructure that support multiple compliance frameworks across sectors, including FedRAMP, IL5, PCI DSS, SOC 2, HIPAA, and HITRUST, allowing customers to segment and label their regulated data.
• Control data residency: Assured Workloads gives you the ability to control the regions where data at rest is stored. 
• Assured support: Assured Workloads’ approach ensures only Google Cloud support personnel meeting specific geographical locations and personnel conditions support customers’ workloads.

Instead of having to configure, manage, and maintain the right controls and guardrails yourself, you select the regulatory framework you need to follow. Assured Workloads automatically configures and deploys the controls needed to help meet your requirements. 

With these specific capabilities, governments can simplify compliance configurations and monitor for violations without missing out on Google Cloud’s innovative technologies, scalability, performance, reliability, and cost savings that are hallmarks of our commercial Cloud offering. 

How it works

When you use Assured Workloads to create controlled environments in Google Cloud, you will be required to set up an Assured Workloads folder. This folder acts as the regulatory boundary to help enforce your chosen compliance framework. They are created with preconfigured platform controls, which are packaged based on the specified regulated data type, personnel controls, and data location. 

Assured Workloads automatically restricts developers to using products and services that are in-scope for your selected compliance framework. Security controls are mapped to Assured Workloads folders, so any Google Cloud resources you deploy in an Assured Workloads folder inherit the same controls. This also helps ensure that only Google Cloud personnel who meet your compliance requirements have the ability to support your resources and prevents resources from being deployed outside of compliant regions. 

Depending on your compliance regime, Assured Workloads supports several different options for encryption. You can use any Google key management service unless your compliance requirements mandate otherwise, including Cloud Key Management Service, Cloud External Key Manager, or customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK). You can also choose Google-managed keys, which provide on-by-default FIPS-validated encryption. 

Here are a few common use cases that companies are already accomplishing with Assured Workloads:

• Iron Mountain uses Assured Workloads to serve our customers’ compliance needs
• Implementing EU Data Sovereignty
• Running CJIS workloads 

However, Assured Workloads is more than a better government cloud or a tool for highly regulated businesses. Assured Workloads is a packaged solution that provides security by default and removes toil and complexity for users. Users can reduce the time and effort required to meet their compliance requirements and also improve the security of their data.

Do I need Assured Workloads? 

We believe that cloud adoption for governments, government suppliers and contractors, and other strictly regulated businesses shouldn’t have to happen in a separate, isolated cloud environment that forces tradeoffs in terms of service availability, scale, and cost. Assured Workloads is a new approach to running regulated workloads that transforms the “govcloud” into a capability that cuts down on the friction of compliance without sacrificing any of the cloud-y goodness. 

To learn more about Assured Workloads, please review these resources: 

• Getting started with Assured Workloads
• Overview of Assured Workloads

Request a free trial today and experience how Aside Assured Workloads helps you achieve compliance-based outcomes.

Content production is increasingly happening in the cloud. While moving a creative process that spans three centuries into the modern era brings challenges and risks, MovieLabs is one organization that takes digital transformation seriously.

A nonprofit research and development group founded by a consortium of the major Hollywood studios, MovieLabs describes their mission as “exploring innovative solutions to industry challenges shared by both our member studios and the broader production, post-production and distribution ecosystem.”

In more than 50 pages of densely-packed ideas and principles, MovieLab’s The Evolution of Media Production lays out an ambitious and revelatory vision for streamlining media production in the cloud. The key themes are summarized in 10 declarative statements, which envision a new modality for media production by the year 2030:

1. All assets are created or ingested straight into the cloud and do not need to be moved.
2. Applications come to the media.
3. Propagation and distribution of assets is a “publish” function.
4. Archives are deep libraries with access policies matching speed, availability and security to the economics of the cloud.
5. Preservation of digital assets includes the future means to access them and edit them.
6. Every individual on a project is identified and verified, and their access permissions are efficiently and consistently managed.
7. All media creation happens in a highly secure environment that adapts rapidly to changing threats.
8. Individual media elements are referenced, accessed, tracked and interrelated using a universal linking system.
9. Media workflows are non-destructive and dynamically created using common interfaces, underlying data formats and metadata.
10. Workflows are designed around real-time iteration and feedback.

The four bolded statements above are further explored in a follow-up whitepaper from MovieLabs, The Evolution of Production Security, which likewise offers six statements about what secure production in the cloud should look like:

1. Security is Intrinsic and does not Inhibit Creative Processes
2. The Security Architecture Addresses Challenges Specific to Cloud Workflows
3. Production Workflows, Processes, and Assets are Secure, even on Untrusted Infrastructure
4. The Content Owner Controls Security and Workflow Integrity
5. The Security Can Be Scaled to Appropriate Levels and Can Integrate
6. The Security Architecture Limits the Spread of any Breach and is Adaptable

The key to understanding these two papers is repeated in their titles: Evolution. Neither document is meant to outline solely what’s possible today; rather they are beacons guiding us toward a future in which the movie business is truly transformed by the cloud operating model. That means a future where media productions run much more like software supply chains: with speed, agility, and scale, and without sacrificing availability or security.

The good news is that it is possible to deploy secure production workloads in the cloud today. Using some of the built-in security features of Google Cloud, content producers can achieve Common Security Architecture for Production (CSAP) “Level 100” security for their assets (using the CSAP scale L100-L300). 

However, we think that “evolution” word is important. As many companies have learned, operating an infrastructure cloud can be costly and often presents new threat vectors for attackers. Our mission at Google Cloud is to provide scalable, reliable services for traditional IT functions and to accelerate the abilities of every organization to digitally transform its business. 

We believe the era of the transformation cloud is dawning, and companies who have been successfully operating in the cloud for years are now looking for ways to reduce costs while maintaining the cloud-scale advantages of agility and global reach. This aligns perfectly with the evolutionary vision of the MovieLabs papers, which envision media workflows changing radically to embrace cloud dynamism without all the unnecessary asset movement and complexity.

An important part of that vision from Google Cloud is that cloud service providers should remain open and interoperable with other clouds and infrastructures.

Here is a quickstart guide to mapping the L100 CSAP requirements to Google Cloud:

As you can see in the diagram, external identity providers (IdPs) such as Okta or Active Directory can serve as core security components of a CSAP L100 architecture. Alternatively, Google Cloud services such as Cloud Identity or Managed AD could be substituted.

Next, Google Cloud’s Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) can be used in combination with Access Context Manager (ACM) to act as the first Policy Enforcement Point. This is an optional step, since it is somewhat redundant with the routing and authorization function performed by the native HP/Teradici Connection Brokers. However, IAP and ACM are core components of Google Cloud’s BeyondCorp architecture, on which CSAP is based. Additionally, adopting IAP with ACM offers productions the ability to swap out the Teradici PCoIP protocol for an alternative, such as Unity’s Parsec, without sacrificing security.

The Teradici Connection Broker is also a Policy Enforcement Point, since groups and role membership can be used to enforce access to specific workstations. 

Finally, the identity context for each user is passed through to the storage layer. For some productions, Google Cloud Storage (GCS) buckets may offer enough functionality; GCS offers an S3-compatible API which should make it easy to immediately adopt OSS tools built for S3. Other options for this include the managed NetApp Cloud Volumes and Dell PowerScale for Google Cloud services. Both of these are managed shared storage services which offer file-level access controls using standard SMB/NFS permissions. There are also a variety of third-party filers available in the Google Cloud Marketplace, such as Nasuni. You can read more about those here.

For added security, both NetApp and PowerScale should be configured to use the private services access model in Google Cloud. This effectively limits any external access to these resources by only allowing traffic from user-managed VPCs into the Google-managed and peered VPC.

Following this architecture, you can see how to achieve CSAP L100 compliance by using either only Google Cloud services or a mix of managed and cloud-first services. In either scenario, access is managed through a unified control plane and based on both user identity and role. Zero Trust principles such as context-aware access and dynamic rulesets could further be applied to the Authentication step using either Google Cloud IAP or the equivalent services from Okta, Active Directory, or others.

At this weekend’s National Association of Broadcasters conference, Google experts will be talking about the cloud and content production, and the intersection of AI and media. The journey to 2030 is only just beginning.

Today, we are putting the power of Google’s insights and intelligence in the hands of risk, fraud, and security teams everywhere. We are pleased to announce the general availability of reCAPTCHA Enterprise Fraud Prevention, a new product that uses Google’s own fraud models, machine learning, and intelligence from protecting more than 6 million websites to help stop payment fraud.

reCAPTCHA Enterprise Fraud Prevention can help protect payment transactions by identifying targeted manual attacks and large-scale fraud attempts. It automatically trains fraud models based on behavior and transaction data to identify events that are likely fraudulent and could cause a dispute or chargeback if accepted. 

When threat actors are identified and blocked on any site in the reCAPTCHA network, the intelligence is made available to help protect other organizations from those same attackers. Organizations can then use the scores to send the transaction for manual review or directly block suspicious transactions, drive increased trust in their legitimate transactions, reduce the amount of friction for good users, and reduce erroneous rejection rates.

“Being a safe and trusted place to give and receive help is our top priority. We are constantly innovating, refining and enhancing our fraud defenses and Google’s reCAPTCHA Enterprise Fraud Prevention adds another layer of industry-leading protection for our users. Combining Google’s rich security expertise with GoFundMe’s focus on fraud prevention is already showing promising results as we strive to keep our platform the safest place to give online,” said Matthew Murray, director of risk, GoFundMe.

According to data obtained from our customers using reCAPTCHA Enterprise Fraud Prevention in private Preview, the new solution can help drive comprehensive value for organizations by:

• Reducing fraud losses: Get behavior modeling (not just mouse movements), stop financial damage created by account takeovers (ATOs), and connect fraud and abuse intelligence across your site and application.
• Increasing legitimate sales: Fraud Prevention can help businesses increase their revenue by providing insights to understand who good users are, who may otherwise be caught in an overly aggressive, customer restrictive fraud model.*

These benefits  are enabled for organizations by:

• Preventing advanced attacks: Stopping sophisticated attacks in an environment where attackers use cloud fraud infrastructure, and data leaks, virtual cards and VPN usage are on the rise
• Increasing trust in good transactions: Focus on good approval rates through a unique combination of supervised and unsupervised models
• Improving customer experience: By preventing fraudulent transactions with zero user friction, Fraud Prevention can help businesses protect legitimate users and increase customer retention

Our customers have used these new capabilities in preview in customer experiences that include online checkouts and payment transactions. Fraud Prevention has been used by merchants and payment processors to block millions of dollars in fraudulent transactions in a frictionless way. 

reCAPTCHA Enterprise provides a comprehensive online fraud detection platform that helps prevent fraudulent, spammy, and abusive digital client activity across your web and application footprint. This platform includes Account Defender, which protects users from account takeovers (ATO), frictionless bot management capabilities, and password leak detection to identify compromised accounts. With an additional API call for Fraud Prevention, organizations can leverage a comprehensive solution to secure financial transactions along with core reCAPTCHA Enterprise capabilities. 

To get started, organizations can install a score-based site key on each part of the payment user flow front end and send transaction data when a purchase occurs. This site key helps train site-specific fraud models and start returning fraud scores for each transaction. 

Ready to put reCAPTCHA Enterprise Fraud Prevention to work? Contact our fraud specialists or your customer success CSM team and sign up with the free tier. You learn more about these new capabilities in reCAPTCHA Enterprise in our product documentation. You can also register for our webinar where our experts will be discussing this capability in great detail on June 1, 2023. 

Coming up at our Security Summit on June 13-14, you can hear how reCAPTCHA Enterprise helped GoFundMe secure their donors from fraud. Sign up here for free Security Summit registration.

When I reflect back on the past year and the pandemic, I’m struck by how the reliance on remote work and operations has changed the fundamentals of business forever. For the financial services industry, this rings particularly true. Many conversations I’m having right now with organizations revolve around embracing a transformation cloud, and thinking of cloud computing not just as an infrastructure decision, but also as the locus for transformation throughout the company. 

Today, as we welcome the industry to our Financial Services Summit, we’ll demonstrate just how Google Cloud accelerates a financial organization’s digital transformation through app and infrastructure modernization, data democratization, people connections, and trusted transactions. We hope you’ll join us.

How we’re helping financial services firms build their transformation clouds

At Google Cloud, we continue to focus on areas where we can bring the best of our capabilities to banking, capital markets, insurance, and payments customers around the world. Our work with financial services industry customers has given us a deep understanding of the real-world, specific use cases that matter most to them. This groundwork led us to engineer products and solutions that are open and flexible, not ones that force them to rip out existing investments in ERP or other early IaaS cloud implementations. 

It’s why we’ve engineered solutions such as Lending DocAI, Open Banking with Apigee, and Datashare for financial services to help transform the industry. These solutions were created with our customers’ security and compliance top-of-mind and are built at the intersection of user-optimized experience, technology, and sovereignty.

At their core, financial institutions want to drive growth, reduce costs, mitigate risk, stay compliant, and increase efficiency. As a result, when we partner with them on their transformation journeys, we consider three essential focus areas: 

• Enabling the human experience and connected interactions
• Building an open and intelligent data foundation for better insights
• Providing the most trusted and secure cloud in the industry

Enabling humans and connected interactions

A company’s transformation is about more than technology; people and culture ultimately drive change. HSBC, for example, recognized its business users would benefit from guided answers to common questions around risk policy compliance, and turned to Google Cloud to leverage AI and machine learning bots to assist employees, ease the burden on policy experts, and improve the user experience. Using Dialogflow, a core component of Contact Center AI, HSBC was able to build a conversational platform that quickly and accurately addresses user needs at scale. 

Another example is Equifax, which used Google Workspace to support collaboration not only internally between employees, but also externally with customers. Customers can use Google Cloud solutions for financial services to build these sorts of technology-enabled human interactions quickly and easily—supporting organizational change at scale.

Building an open and intelligent data foundation for smarter, faster insights

The real impact of Google Cloud solutions for financial services comes when the whole company has access to the right information at the right time, and can act more intelligently on that data. Our solutions help businesses safely leverage their data and get a complete 360-degree view of their customers’ information, which can often be scattered across multiple systems (CRM, lending, credit, etc.). This helps financial institutions improve the overall customer experience—and sometimes even develop new products quickly. 

Indeed, all financial institutions are looking for ways to grow revenue and reduce expenses, and data can be a critical ingredient to doing both effectively. As daily transactions rise, so does the volume and complexity of data. But to implement new customer experience innovations (and new revenue streams), financial institutions must first capture data effectively. This is why AXA Switzerland, for example, uses real-time analytics on Google Cloud to gain cross-industry insights about future trends and customer preferences.

Financial services organizations also need the confidence of building on a platform that provides choice, flexibility, and agility to move fast. It’s why we have an open cloud approach that allows Google Cloud services to run in different physical locations such as on-premises, other public clouds, and the edge. Customers can also harness the power of data and AI through our open APIs, machine-learning services, and analytics engines on any major cloud platform. This is why companies like Macquarie Bank are taking advantage of Google Cloud’s open, hybrid architecture to modernize and empower its developers.

Compliant and secure to address risk and regulatory needs

As a highly regulated industry, financial services is focused on security and compliance, risk and regulations, and fraud detection and prevention. Google Cloud offers unique capabilities to earn customers’ trust as part of our continuing work to be the most trusted cloud in the industry. Google Cloud provides a secure foundation that you can verify and independently control. Our cloud technology reduces risk and data loss, because it is built on comprehensive zero-trust architecture. Finally, we offer a shared-fate model built on best practices in risk management via automation, guidance, and insurance. This is why customers like BBVA have confidence anywhere their systems may operate. 

On the regulatory front, global legislators and regulators continue to focus on the stability of the industry that only a decade ago went through one of the biggest liquidity crises in history. With this oversight comes strong expectations of risk mitigation. Google Cloud offers a single, global set of controls, reviewed by financial institutions and regulators around the world, and verified in collaborative audits—making compliance simpler and less costly for our customers.

Finally, Google Cloud allows financial services firms to operate confidently with advanced security tools that help protect data, applications, and infrastructure, as well as their customers from fraudulent activity, spam, and abuse. We help protect your data against threats, using the same infrastructure and security services we use for our own operations, ensuring you never have to trade-off between ease of use and security. Google Cloud encrypts data at-rest and in-transit. And we now also offer the ability to encrypt data-in use, while it’s being processed for customer VM and container workloads.

Let us help you with your transformation cloud journey

We’ve seen leading financial services companies embrace Google Cloud to help them move beyond infrastructure toward the next phase of their cloud evolution. This is an era where no company is better positioned to lead than Google Cloud, and we’re excited to help you with your journey.

Learn more about Google Cloud for financial services.