What to Look for from Cloud CISO Perspective
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May is a big month for the security industry. It’s been over a year since we gathered for RSA in San Francisco for one of 2020’s last major in-person events. While we likely won’t be together in person this year, it’s an important time for the security community to come together and reflect on many accomplishments, and to consider the challenges still ahead of us. As the world focuses on security incidents and all the risks that still need resolving, it is important to stand back, on occasion, and also note that immense progress has been made by large numbers of small, medium and large enterprises to protect themselves and their customers against increased threats. What is also amazing is to see organizations do this while accelerating their digital transformations, supporting and protecting customers and managing ongoing remote working challenges. We are privileged to play our part in supporting those great teams.
It’s also been a busy month for us here at Google Cloud since our inaugural CISO perspectives blog post in April. Today, I’ll recap our cloud security and industry highlights, a sneak peak of what’s ahead from Google at RSA and more.
Thoughts from around the industry
- Risk Governance of Digital Transformation in the Cloud – In our latest Office of the CISO whitepaper, we shared guidance on both the challenges and opportunities of cloud transformation for Chief Risk Officers, Chief Compliance Officers, Heads of Internal Audit and their teams. A misconception we sometimes see among these executives is that moving to the cloud creates more risk to manage. Having held these leadership positions in previous roles, I believe that the cloud is as much a means of managing security, resilience and other risks as it is a risk in its own right. The whitepaper dives deep into considerations for each of these leadership functions as their organization embarks on a digital transformation journey.
- The importance of meeting global compliance requirements – Compliance is critical for building trust with customers in regulated industries, especially the public sector. It is worth remembering that in any critical industry, where there can be material impact from incidents, strong industry practices and standards to protect customers are vital (I wrote about this last summer). At Google Cloud, we’re regularly adding new compliance and security certifications to meet our customers’ needs globally. Recently, we expanded our list of FedRAMP High-certified products to include Cloud DNS, and helped our customers in the Asia-Pacific region address various compliance requirements to meet new government regulations for security and data protections. Google Cloud was also the only cloud service provider to complete an annual pooled audit with the Collaborative Cloud Audit Group (CCAG), which is a syndicate of 39 leading European financial institutions and insurance companies who depend on cloud infrastructure and technologies to deliver innovative solutions and experiences for their customers. Having spent most of my career in the financial services industry, I know firsthand the importance of managing risk assessments for outsourced vendors to provide the necessary assurances customers need from their cloud providers.
RSA 2021
We have a great lineup of speaking sessions and keynotes from Googlers at RSA this year. Below are the highlights you don’t want to miss:
- I’ll be doing a session on May 20 about supply chain resilience, where a panel of experts will dive into how we can adjust risk and security initiatives to handle the next “punch to the supply chain.” Additionally, on May 18 I’ll join many of my esteemed CISO leaders from various industries and governments for a keynote discussion on our top security insights, lessons learned and best practices for how we move forward as an industry to address the next wave of challenges.
- Google’s Senior Director of Information Security Heather Adkins will deliver a session on how to build secure and reliable systems at scale, which will cover principles from Google’s Site Reliability Engineering book with the same title (available for free download here). I’m most looking forward to Heather’s advice for how we as an industry can reshape our security thinking, based on modern architectures and technologies that can help organizations design scalable and reliable systems that are fundamentally secure.
- Nelly Porter, Senior Product Manager at Google Cloud Security, will participate in a panel discussion with security experts on the importance of Confidential Computing technology, how it’s changing the security landscape and where it’s headed. Google Cloud has made great progress in delivering a Confidential Computing portfolio for our customers in regulated industries over the past year, and we’re excited for new milestones in 2021.
Google cloud security highlights
- Infrastructure and SRE spotlight – Before I joined Google Cloud, I always admired the infrastructure and benefits this organization delivers that are uniquely Google – from the subsea cable innovations to SRE inventions and principles. Security and resiliency are baked into every layer of our infrastructure. Many of the Googlers who build and support our platform have sat in the same seat as our customers, so they understand those needs intimately. Over the last few months it’s been amazing to watch our technical infrastructure team grow, and the direct reliability, operational resilience and security benefits that team brings to our customers. For example, we’ve opened a new region in Poland, announced the first subsea cable that will directly connect the U.S. to Singapore with fiber pairs over an express route, and released an SRE book focused on how organizations can complete a successful cloud migration.
- New security foundations blueprint guide – As part of our mission to deliver the industry’s most trusted cloud, we strive to operate in a shared-fate model for risk management in conjunction with our customers. This includes sharing opinionated step-by-step guidance with key decision points and focus areas for how our customers deploy workloads in Google Cloud. This is why we’ve updated our Google Cloud security foundations guide and corresponding Terraform blueprint scripts. These blueprints are tremendously helpful to many stakeholders within an enterprise, like a CISO that needs to understand our key principles for cloud security, or a C-Suite business leader that needs to quickly identify the skills their teams need to meet an organization’s security, risk, and compliance needs on Google Cloud.
When we think about the types of features to build into products, we have many principles we follow. But the two that I keep coming back to as crucial are:
- The need for secure products not just security products. All products should have security built in and while we do build great security products our security and other teams remain focused on constantly enhancing the base levels of security and the security features in all our products.
- Defense in Depth. We don’t just focus on defense in depth from attacks – for ourselves and our customers. We also prioritize defense in depth from configuration errors or other hazards.
As you see below in some of the highlights of new features and products, these represent our commitment to secure products and all forms of defense in depth.
- Workload identity federation – Service account keys are powerful credentials, and can represent a security risk if they are not managed correctly. A safer approach is to use workload identity federation, using IAM to grant external identities IAM roles, including the ability to impersonate service accounts. This lets you access resources directly and eliminates the maintenance and security burden associated with service account keys. We also offered related overall guidance on the best way to use and authenticate service accounts on Google Cloud.
- VPC-SC Directional Policies – With VPC Service Controls (VPC-SC), admins can define a security perimeter around Google-managed services to control communication to and between those services. Using VPC-SC, you can isolate your production GCP resources from unauthorized VPC networks or the internet. But what if you need to transfer data between isolated environments that you’ve set up? VPC-SC directional policies is a new secure data exchange feature that allows you to configure efficient, private, and secure data exchange between isolated environments.
- Anthos service mesh supports VMs as well as clusters – Most enterprise compute resources are still in VMs and many will remain there for a long time to come. In Anthos 1.7, your VM-based workloads can now take advantage of the same mesh functionality as your container-based workloads.
- Cloud Spanner CMEK and Access Approvals – Cloud Spanner is Google Cloud’s fully managed relational database that offers unlimited scale, high performance, strong consistency across regions and high availability. Spanner now supports customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) and Access Approval, Google Cloud’s industry-leading controls to require approval before access to your content by Google support and engineering teams.
- External Key Manager enhancements – In early 2020 we launched Cloud External Key Manager (Cloud EKM), the industry’s leading Hold-Your-Own-Key (HYOK) product. Using Cloud EKM, the keys used to protect your data stored and processed in Google Cloud are completely hosted and managed outside of Google Cloud infrastructure. Cloud EKM initially launched with support for BigQuery and GCE/PD; we expanded support for Cloud SQL, GKE, Dataflow Shuffle, and Secret Manager, with CMEK support currently in beta. We also provided in-depth documentation on the functionality, architecture and use cases for Cloud EKM in a new whitepaper.
- Web App and API Protection solution – Web applications and public APIs are increasingly important to how organizations interface with their customers and partners, and we’ve seen increased investment in tools to protect these resources from fraud and abuse. Google Cloud’s new Web App and API protection solution is based on the same technology Google uses to protect its public-facing services against web application exploits, DDoS attacks, fraudulent bot activity, and API targeted threats. It provides protection across clouds and on-premises environments.
- Threat Intel for Chronicle – Most threat intelligence feeds require security teams to do the implementation and legwork. With our new Threat Intel for Chronicle offering, however, our intelligence insights are applied automatically across your security telemetry to present unique observations within your environment. Threat Intel for Chronicle is exclusively curated for enterprise customers by Uppercase, Google Cloud’s intelligence research and applications team to provide our perspective on threats across the internet and surface them as relevant alerts.
That wraps up another month of thoughts and highlights. If you’d like to have this Cloud CISO Perspectives post delivered every month to your inbox, click here to sign-up, and we’ll see you in June!
How One Company Uses AI and Data Analysis to Boost Revenue
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AI, deep learning, and image recognition is transforming the shopping experience. These technologies enable consumers to use product images or screenshots rather than text to search for similar products. This improves the customer experience and enables retailers with online and offline outlets to provide a genuine omnichannel experience.
The lack of complexity and the ease of use of BigQuery has enabled ViSenze to reduce its data infrastructure and management costs by 30%–50%, and scale up without incurring downtime.
—Renjie Yao, Data Platform Lead, ViSenze
Visual commerce provider ViSenze is helping some of the world’s leading retailers improve conversion rates through image-based search.
The business’s products also enable media companies to use the platform to turn images and videos into engagement opportunities—driving new and incremental revenues.
Created through NExT—a research center established by the National University of Singapore and Tsinghua University of China—ViSenze now operates in the United States, United Kingdom, India, China, and Singapore. The business is backed by Japan-based internet and ecommerce company Rakuten and cross-border investment specialist WI Harper Group.
Growth in SMB and Mobiles
Renjie Yao, Data Platform Lead at ViSenze, sees opportunities for growth in the small-to-medium business sector, where companies do not have the resources to build similar technologies, and with mobile device OEMs to integrate ViSenze natively on smartphones.
Phone owners can activate a “shopping lens” on camera and gallery apps to capture an image of a product. They then receive matching results from more than 800 partner merchants and retailers and can then click through to product pages on partner apps or mobile websites. Alternatively, they may use a photo to compare products sold on different sites or shop matching styles.
“Our research found Google Cloud provided a complete, integrated ecosystem rather than a disparate collection of tools and components, and so was ideal for our needs.”
—Renjie Yao, Data Platform Lead, ViSenze
The ViSenze API analyzes the contents of a selected or clicked image and sends the information back to the organization’s visual commerce platform. The platform feeds back similar results based on that information.
The ViSenze offering also extends to image analysis for the tagging of product attributes—such as a white turtleneck cardigan with full sleeves—to provide an improved search experience.
Data Vital to ViSenze
Capturing and analyzing large volumes of data is integral to ViSenze. “We have to understand how consumers interact with our customers’ ecommerce websites and apps,” says Yao. “For example, we need to know who has looked at a particular pair of jeans on a website and whether that visit led to a conversion. We can then tell that customer whether they need to make more stock available.”
ViSenze also relies on data to provide high-quality training for its image recognition models and its domain-specific models for online retail.
Protect Customer Data
Data is vital to ViSenze—but customer privacy is most important. “All the data we collect is transparent to our customers, meaning they can decide what they do not want us to collect. In addition, all personal data processing complies with privacy protection regulations in each region, such as the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe.”
A Quick Move to the Cloud
ViSenze started operations using servers, storage, networking, and associated systems in an on-premises data center operated by NExT.
However, to support rapid growth, the business decided to move its workloads to the cloud. ViSenze opted for a multi-cloud architecture, using in part a Google Cloud data infrastructure.
“Our research found Google Cloud provided a complete, integrated ecosystem rather than a disparate collection of tools and components, and so was ideal for our needs,” says Yao. “We could connect different components with the click of a mouse.” Further, the business found it could easily configure rules and pipelines to route data logs to relevant Google Cloud services.
The review found Google Cloud’s extensive managed services would also remove administration and maintenance tasks from ViSenze’s in-house technology team—freeing team members to focus on more valuable tasks.
In addition, Google Cloud provided the security features—including custom hardware running hardened operating systems and file systems and encryption of data at rest and in transit—needed to protect sensitive information. Finally, the location of Google Cloud regions in several countries would enable the business to meet regulatory and data sovereignty requirements.
A Three-Month Implementation
ViSenze opted to move to Google Cloud in mid-2017 and completed a three-month implementation using internal resources. “The process was very smooth and intuitive, and we had no problems building our entire data platform within Google Cloud,” says Yao.
The business now uses an architecture comprising Google Kubernetes Engine to manage and orchestrate Docker containers running in Google Cloud Platform; BigQuery to provide an analytics data warehouse, with Google Data Studio providing customizable visualization and reports; Stackdriver to monitor and manage virtual machine instances and services inside Google Cloud; Cloud SQL to manage its relational databases for real-time analytics; Compute Engine to provide compute resources; Cloud Storage to store files and objects; Cloud Pub/Sub to provide real-time messaging between applications; and Cloud Functions to build event-driven applications.
After collecting the request logs of users in virtual machine instances and Docker containers, ViSenze distributes them in three directions. “We export raw logs into Cloud Pub/Sub for indexing inside an Elasticsearch search engine, and to a BigQuery data warehouse for further analytics,” explains Yao. “We also use Cloud Functions-created applications to obtain the logs from Cloud Pub/Sub to perform some real-time calculations.”
“We are currently using Airflow workflow management on Compute Engine as our hosted ETL platform, but are likely to move to Cloud Composer in future.”
500 Million Records Per Day
With Google Cloud providing its data infrastructure, ViSenze is well positioned to meet internal and customer demands for more granular insights. The business is now processing 500 million records per day through BigQuery and saves up to one year’s aggregated data—excluding any personal data—in the data warehouse for analysis.
The nature of ViSenze’s business means most reports are generated for data processed on an hourly, daily, or monthly basis. “BigQuery is extremely stable and performance optimized, regardless of the volume of data it processes,” says Yao. “Across BigQuery and other Google Cloud Platform services, we’ve recorded 99.99% availability over the past year.”
The lack of complexity and the ease of use of BigQuery has enabled ViSenze to reduce its data infrastructure and management costs by 30%–50%, and scale up without incurring downtime.
“With BigQuery, we have saved the equivalent of two full-time engineers and now need only half of one person’s time to maintain our whole data platform,” says Yao.
“In addition, BigQuery integrates closely with Data Studio, enabling non-technical people in our product and business teams to create dynamic, detailed analysis dashboards. We now use Data Studio to create nearly 50 separate reports.”
The business has now grown to offer access to more than 1 billion users and a listing of more than 400 million purchasable products.
Next Steps
ViSenze is now researching the potential of the Cloud AutoML suite of machine learning products to improve the training of its models and run a fully managed NoSQL database through Cloud Datastore.
“A NoSQL database service is the only missing piece of our architecture for now, and using Cloud Datastore would enable us to focus almost exclusively on our business,” says Yao. “With Google Cloud Platform, we are ideally positioned to continue providing support to our business team and help them continue expanding into new markets.
“In addition, we can help retailers and consumers to unlock the potential of the web and apps to transform the purchasing experience.”
AI-powered Business Messages for Timely, Engaging and Helpful Conversations with Customers
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Over the last two years, we’ve seen a significant uptick in the number of people using messaging to connect with businesses. Whether it was checking hours of operation, verifying what was in stock, or scheduling a pick-up, the pandemic caused a significant shift in consumer behavior.
- 45% of users are spending more time on messaging services because of the pandemic
- 85% of consumers would like to message brands directly
With the rise in demand for messaging, consumers expect communication with businesses to be speedy, simple, and convenient. For businesses, keeping up with customer inquiries can be a labor-intensive process, and offering 24/7 support outside of store hours can be costly.
To help businesses seamlessly deliver helpful, timely, and engaging conversations with customers when and where they need help, we introduced AI-powered Business Messages.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fcgP3RHjBLY%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26
What is AI-powered Business Messages?
With AI-powered Business Messages, you can connect with your customers in their moment of need, in the places they’re looking for answers—such as Google Search, Google Maps, or any brand-owned channel. For instance, check out how Walmart customers in the US are able to receive real-time information on product availability, straight from a search results page.
People turn to Google when they are searching for answers to their questions, looking to buy something, or trying to accomplish a particular task with one of our many tools. In fact, 68% of all online experiences begin with a search engine.
At Google, we know how important it is for interactions with a brand to be personalized, helpful, and simple. With AI-powered Business Messages, customers are able to chat with virtual agents that understand, interact, and respond in natural ways.
We are also combining smart automation with the ability for customers to chat with live agents when it’s really needed. This approach saves your customers precious time, while also saving you money. And with Business Messages automatically handling many customer inquiries in the background, businesses have the option to distribute their human customer service agents to address other needs.
Getting started with conversational AI is easy with Bot-in-a-Box
We know it can be difficult to get started with AI. That’s why we are utilizing existing Google AI tools like Dialogflow—part of Google Cloud Contact Center AI—to create the capability within Google’s Business Messages called Bot-in-a-Box, which makes getting started with Conversational AI easy. Bot-in-a-Box allows for fast and effective adoption of automation for businesses of all sizes.
Enabling Business Messages with Bot-in-a-Box can be as simple as leveraging an existing customer FAQ document you already have, whether it’s from a web page or an internal document. And since the conversational AI is powered by Business Messages and Dialogflow working together, your chat bot is able to understand and respond to customer questions automatically without the need to write code.
Bot-in-a-Box also supports other critical journeys like “Custom Intents.” That means that your bot is able to understand the different ways customers express a similar question and respond accurately by using machine learning capabilities.
Finding success
In April 2021, Wake County courthouses in North Carolina partnered with Tango Technology to implement Business Messages when it became apparent that being able to provide the public and attorneys with around-the-clock access to information would significantly reduce the pressure on courthouse staff. Using Bot-in-a-Box, Tango Technology was able to customize a solution for Wake County Courthouse, Justice Center, and Clerk of Superior Court in just four days.
“With the combination of Google’s Business Messages, GCP, and Dialogflow, we were able to spin up an AI-driven bot for the courts in days. And the technology stack allows us to continually improve by adding functionality in an agile process.”— Mike Lotz, Co-Founder, Tango Technology
With Business Messages, North Carolina courthouses saw a 37% decrease in the call volume handled by courthouse staff. With 398,298 fewer phone calls during the first year of operation, the AI-based messages helped Wake County Courthouse work more efficiently and productively.
We’ve seen many brands benefiting from AI-powered Business Messages. For instance, Levi’s saw a 30% increase in off-hours shoppers and surpassed 85% customer satisfaction scores after implementing Business Messages. They also drove 30x more store-related questions than Levi’s website chat.
Bring Google’s conversational AI to your storefront with Business Messages
Google’s Business Messages makes it easier for businesses of all sizes to engage their existing or potential customers in a virtual conversation, when and where they need it.
To learn more, watch our Cloud Next session here or visit us at g.co/businessmessages. We have specialized services to help you get started and can share the wisdom of our channel partners and dedicated experts who specialize in unleashing the potential of conversational AI.
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Metro Consolidates 100 SAP Instances on Google Cloud
German retailer Metro, with operations in 25 countries across Europe and Asia and employing over 150,000 people, decided to consolidate its 100 SAP instances into one SAP S/4HANA system running on the Google Cloud Platform.
This helped the company lower costs, increase efficiency, and improve customer experience. In addition, the company is using Google BigQuery and advanced analytics to increase its sales.
Watch Timo Salzsieder, Metro CIO/CSO, explain the company’s journey with SAP on Google Cloud.
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Greenovation: Adani and Google Cloud Join Forces for a Sustainable and Data-Driven India
As the biggest renewable energy developer, Adani aims to put India on the green map. Working with the world’s cleanest cloud inspired the organisation to solve their own efficiency issues, and better manage their facilities across the country to lower their carbon footprint.
- For more on Adani, visit: https://www.adani.com/
- For more on Google Cloud Customer Stories, visit: https://cloud.google.com/customers
- For more on how our customers across the region are solving with Google Cloud, visit: APAC YouTube Channel: @GoogleCloudAPAC
- Follow Google Cloud India on Facebook for more updates: https://www.facebook.com/GoogleCloudIN
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Strategies for Migrating to the Cloud
What are the technologies that are helping enterprises scale, adapt, and modernize? Are there any strategies that enterprises can adopt for moving to the cloud?
What this webinar to find out the different migration patterns to the cloud and learn how enterprises can choose the right strategies based on their business and technical environments, and the tooling that can help them get there.
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BigQuery’s User-friendly SQL is Like a Cool Drink for Hot Summer
With summer just around the corner, things are really heating up. But you’re in luck because this month BigQuery is supplying a cooler full of ice cold refreshments with this release of user-friendly SQL capabilities. We are pleased to announce three categories of BigQuery user-friendly SQL launches: Powerful Analytics Features,
