We opened our Sydney cloud region in 2017 and, since then, we have continued to invest and expand across Australia and New Zealand to support the digital future of organizations of all sizes. In Australia, Google Cloud supports almost A$3.2 billion in annual gross benefits to businesses and consumers. This includes A$686 million to businesses using Google Workspace and Google Cloud Platform, another A$698 million to Google Cloud partners, and A$1.8 billion to consumers.¹ 

For customers in Australia, New Zealand and across Asia Pacific, we’re excited to announce that our new Google Cloud region in Melbourne is now open. Designed to help businesses build highly available applications for their customers, the Melbourne region is our second Google Cloud region in Australia and 11th to open in Asia Pacific. 

We’re celebrating the occasion with a digital event where federal minister for the Digital Economy, Jane Hume, and customers Australia Post, Trade Me, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, The Australian Football League and Macquarie Bank will share their perspectives. Come join us!

A global network of regions

Melbourne joins the existing 26 Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. With this our second region in Australia, customers benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, all the while maintaining data sovereignty in-country.

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

We also continue to invest in expanding connectivity across the Australia and New Zealand region by working with partners to establish subsea cables and new Dedicated Cloud Interconnect locations and points of presence in major cities including Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Canberra, Brisbane and Auckland.

Collectively, this will deliver geographically distributed and secure infrastructure to customers across Australia and New Zealand – which is especially important for those in regulated industries such as Financial Services and the Public Sector.  

What customers and partners are saying

Navigating this past year has been a challenge for companies as they grapple with changing customers demands and greater 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 Melbourne will help our customers adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working.  

“We moved to Google Cloud to improve the stability and resilience of our infrastructure and become more cloud-native as part of a digital transformation program that keeps the customer at the heart of our business. We welcome Google Cloud’s investment in ANZ and the opportunities the Google Cloud Melbourne region presents to improve Trade Me’s agility and performance. – Paolo Ragone, Chief Technology Officer, Trade Me     

“We initially turned to Google Cloud to help us process parcels faster and gain deeper insights into our business and its processes. The relationship has continued to deliver benefits to our customers and our organization and we welcome Google Cloud’s opening of the Melbourne region as presenting even more opportunities for businesses to innovate and generate efficiencies.” – Munro Farmer, Chief Information Officer, Australia Post.

“We are well progressed with our multi-year strategy to grow and transform our organization to be Australia’s bank of choice. Google Cloud’s advanced data capabilities and renowned culture of innovation are strongly aligned to this strategy and will allow us to become even more innovative and agile in responding to our customers’ ever-changing needs. We were quick to run our workloads out of the Melbourne cloud region and we believe Google Cloud’s expanded investment in local infrastructure will further assist us on our business transformation journey.” – Andrew Cresp, Chief Information Officer, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank.

“We have a clear vision when it comes to innovating to deliver world-class service to our customers, and our partnership with Google Cloud is core to that strategy. The company’s continued investments in local infrastructure and technology present new opportunities for us as we advance our transformation journey in this digital-first era.” – Chris Smith, Vice President, Digital Service, Optus

Our global ecosystem of channel partners has expanded by more than 400% in the last two years, and we look forward to continuing our close relationships with partners  in Australia and New Zealand as we help customers modernize, innovate, scale and grow.

“Australian companies are increasingly realising the benefits of their cloud investments and are now looking to transform their organisations at scale. We are excited about the potential and new value that the Google Melbourne Cloud region will bring to our clients as we continue to work together on delivering intelligent and innovative solutions to Australian organisations.” – Tara Brady, CEO of Accenture Australia and New Zealand

“Google Cloud has always been there for its customers for the long haul and the opening of the new Melbourne Cloud region is great news. This increased resilience and scale will empower companies of all sizes to be bold in accelerating their digital transformation plans.” – Tony Nicol,  CEO of Servian

“We’re excited about the launch of the Melbourne Cloud region. It will cater to the needs of industries we work closely with including healthcare and financial services, and will further enhance how we jointly deliver on the compliance, privacy and security requirements of companies as they advance their digital transformation.” – Simon Poulton, CEO of Kasna

“The opening of the new Google Cloud region in Melbourne is fantastic news as it now enables DXC customers access to enhanced services for their mission critical application and data solutions across two regions within Australia.  As our customers modernise their application estate, many are seeking dual region cloud services, and DXC is excited to partner with Google Cloud to deliver these services to customers in Australia and New Zealand.” – Tim Fraser, Google Practice Lead ANZ at DXC Technology

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 Melbourne offers new technology and tools that can be a catalyst for this change.  Click here to learn more about all our Google Cloud locations.

^{1. AlphaBeta, The Economic Impact of Google Cloud to Australia, July 2021}

Access to the cloud has advanced the distribution and consumption of financial information on a global scale. In parallel, the global financial data landscape has been transformed by an influx of alternative data sources, including social media, meteorological data, satellite imagery, and other data. Exchanges and market data providers now find they need to include these new datasets to enrich their products and compete, which has meant they now must consider cloud-based models to keep up with the demands of their customers who expect easy, quick, flexible and cost-efficient ways to consume market data.

To address these needs, today we’re announcing the general availability of Datashare for financial services, a new Google Cloud solution that brings together the entire capital markets ecosystem—data publishers, and data consumers—to exchange market data securely and easily.

Datashare helps organize third-party financial information, making it accessible and useful to market data publishers and data consumers. We open-sourced the entire Datashare solution so market data publishers can now onboard their licensed datasets to Google Cloud securely, quickly and easily, while data consumers can consume that data as a service in tools of their preference, such as BigQuery.

Three ways to distribute and consume your data

Batch data delivery

Datashare provides a batch data delivery mechanism for data publishers to deliver their reference data, historical tick data, alternative market data sources and more via BigQuery, reducing the administrative burden on data consumers to extract insights from data. 

Real-time data streaming delivery

By using this event-based data delivery channel for rapidly changing instrument prices, tick data, orders, news and others via Pub/Sub, data consumers can reliably process individual messages or rewind to a point in time to replay a prior market scenario and test model changes.

Monetizing licensed datasets

Market data publishers can onboard their licensed datasets to Google Cloud and make them available via a one-stop-shop on Google Cloud Marketplace, enabling a new sales channel to expand market reach.

Reference architecture

Check out the diagram below to see how you can share your batch and real-time data directly to your Google Cloud customers with BigQuery and Pub/Sub.

As you can see in the above reference architecture, both publishers and consumers can derive several benefits from the solution:

Benefits for data publishers

• You no longer have to maintain your own delivery and licensing infrastructure.
• You can easily package and deliver granular data products and experiments with SQL.
• You can have a solution that scales with your business as data volumes and number of customers grow.

Benefits for data consumers

• Your data is ready for analysis and machine learning (ML)— you no longer have to maintain extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines to load files and transform data.
• You can avoid the expense and burden of maintaining multiple copies of large data files.
• You can be more targeted with consumption of data using BigQuery queries, improving performance, and compliance, and reducing cost.

Accessing the datasets

Google Cloud has been working with multiple industry firms on innovating in the market data space. By using Datashare for publishing, data publishers can make their entire datasets available on Google Cloud. Early adopters of Datashare include firms such as OneTick and Accern. OneTick’s datasets include reference and historical futures data (that can be accessed in our console with your login). Accern’s datasets include alternative data such as market sentiment and credit analysis data (that can be accessed in our console with your login).

To make it more helpful, we partnered with Accern to create a hypothetical scenario to describe the data acquisition and analytics process step-by-step.

Accern use case 

As a sustainability analyst, you require an economic, social and governance (ESG) dataset to determine which sector is the most widely covered ESG sector by analysts, and to also identify the sector with the lowest ESG sentiment score. Now, you can discover and acquire an ESG dataset in Google Cloud.

Step 1. Navigate to the Financial Services solutions page in the Google Cloud console:

Step 2. Click a dataset, for example Accern AI-Generated ESG Insights, then review the overview details, plans and pricing, documentation and support information. To view the available pricing tiers, click ‘View All Plans’. Once you’ve decided on a tier that you would like to subscribe to, click ‘Select’, choose a billing account and review and accept the terms of service to complete the subscription. Once the steps are complete, click ‘Subscribe’ at the bottom. An overlay window will appear, click ‘Register with Accern’ to activate and complete the subscription.

Step 3. Once activation is complete, you’ll be directed to the Datashare ‘My Products’ screen. Voila! You are now subscribed to Accern’s ESG Scores dataset and can access it in your Google Cloud instance using BigQuery. To access the data, click the hour glass icon on the corresponding ‘My Products’ record that you just purchased. An overlay will present you with the details on the dataset and/or table. Click the ‘Navigate to Table’ button to navigate through to the BigQuery console.

Step 4. Now that you have access and are in the BigQuery console, it’s time to generate data insights.

^{For this example, we’ve eliminated the company identifying information that is included as part of the subscription and aggregated company ESG in a view where each row represents a day, an industry sector, a specific identified ‘ESG Issues’ (event_group and event) and the respective ‘ESG Sentiment’ per issue.}

For example, row 1 indicates that within the ‘Healthcare’ sector, there was a ‘Social – Civil Society’ issue identified and it had a negative ESG sentiment score of -15.35.

Step 5. Generate a report by exporting it to Data Studio to build visualizations and conduct additional analysis on the ESG data.

Select ‘Export’ and ‘Explore with Data Studio’.

Step 6. Build a simple/basic report.

Now that the ESG data appears in Data Studio, you can start by building a simple chart to help you understand which industry sectors have the highest volume of discussions around ESG and the overall ESG Sentiment per industry sector.

To build the chart:

• Select the chart type ‘Table’.

• Include Entity_Sector as your dimension to aggregate results by ‘Industry Sector.’
• Include Signal_ID as a measure to count the number of ESG passages identified per ‘Industry Sector.’
• Include AVG(Event_Sentiment) as a measure to display the overall ESG Sentiment per ‘Industry Sector’ across ESG Issues.

You can see sectors that are  most discussed when it comes to ESG related topics and their corresponding ‘ESG Sentiment’ scores.

Step 7. Build your final report in Data Studio.

As a next step you can further drill into the data to understand ESG data specific to each ‘Industry Sector’ and identify positive and negative ESG practices. 

Accern has built a more complex sample dashboard and made it available publicly here. You can interact with this report and play around with the data. The dashboard can help to identify material ESG insights for each sector to inform your investment and risk processes. If you have additional questions, you can reach out to Accern directly.

Discovering, accessing and analyzing licensed datasets is quick and easy. Stay tuned for more updates on new licensed datasets.

Publishing your data via Datashare

If you are a publisher of market data, alternative, or exotic data, you can use Datashare to get it published on Google Cloud Marketplace.

Start by joining the Partner Advantage program by registering for the Partner Advantage Portal and applying for the Partner Advantage Build Model engagement. Visit our getting started guide for information to get started on publishing licensed datasets in the Marketplace. Stay tuned for a future blog post about using Datashare to publish datasets in the Marketplace.

More solutions for capital markets

Check out other Google Cloud solutions for capital markets.

A critical component of any security operations team’s job is to deliver high-fidelity detections of potential threats across the breadth of adversary tactics. But increasingly sophisticated threat actors, an expanding attack surface, and an ever-present cybersecurity talent shortage make this task more challenging than ever.

Google keeps more people safe online than anyone else. Individuals, businesses and governments globally depend on our products that are secure-by-design and secure-by-default. Part of the “magic” behind Google’s security is the sheer scale of threat intelligence we are able to derive from our billions of users, browsers, and devices.

Today, we are putting the power of Google’s intelligence in the hands of security operations teams. We are thrilled to announce the general availability of curated detections as part of our Chronicle SecOps Suite. These detections are built by our Google Cloud Threat Intelligence (GCTI) team, and are actively maintained to reduce manual toil in your team.

Our detections provide security teams with high quality, actionable, out-of-the-box threat detection content curated, built and maintained by Google Cloud Threat Intelligence (GCTI) researchers. Our scale, and depth of intelligence, gained by securing billions of users everyday, gives us a unique vantage point to craft effective and targeted detections. These native detection sets cover a wide variety of threats for cloud and beyond, including Windows-based attacks like ransomware, remote-access tools (RAT), infostealers, data exfiltration, suspicious activity, and weakened configurations.

With this launch, security teams can smoothly leverage Google’s expertise and unique visibility into the threat landscape. This release helps understaffed and overstressed security teams keep up with an ever evolving threat landscape, quickly identify threats, and drive effective investigation and response. With this new release, security teams can:

• Enable high quality curated detections with a single click from within the Chronicle console.
• Operationalize data with high-fidelity threat detections, stitched with context available from authoritative sources (such as IAM and CMDB).
• Accelerate investigation and response by finding anomalistic assets and domains with prevalence visualization for the detections triggered.
• Map detection coverage to the MITRE ATT&CK framework to better understand adversary tactics and techniques and uncover potential gaps in defenses.

Detections are constantly updated and refined by GCTI researchers based on the evolving threat landscape. The first release of curated detections includes two categories that cover a broad range of threats, including:

• Windows-based threats: Coverage for several classes of threats including infostealers, ransomware, RATs, misused software, and crypto activity.
• Cloud attacks and cloud misconfigurations: Secure cloud workloads with additional coverage around exfiltration of data, suspicious behavior, and additional vectors.

Let’s look at an example of how you can put curated detections to work within the Chronicle dashboard, monitor coverage, and map to MITRE ATT&CK®.

An analyst can learn more details around specific detections and understand how they map to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. There are customized settings to configure deployment and alerting, and specify exceptions via reference lists.

You can see each rule which has generated a detection against your log data in the Chronicle rules dashboard. You can observe detections associated with the rule and pivot to investigative views. For example, here is the detection view from the timeline of an Empire Powershell Stager launch triggered by the Windows RAT rule set. You can also easily pivot to associated information and investigate the asset on which it was triggered.

By surfacing impactful, high-efficacy detections, Chronicle can enable analysts to spend time responding to actual threats and reduce alert fatigue. Our customers who used curated detections during our public preview were able to detect malicious activity and take actions to prevent threats earlier in their lifecycle. And there’s more to come. We will be delivering a steady release of new detection categories covering a wide variety of threats, community-driven content, and other out-of-the-box analytics.

Ready to put Google’s intelligence to work in your Security Operations Center? Contact Google Cloud sales or your customer success CSM team. You can also learn more about all these new capabilities in Google Chronicle in our product documentation.

At AirAsia, we operate a fleet of more than 270 aircraft across 23 markets, fly to more than 150 destinations and carry 100m guests each year. We’ve also been named the world’s best low-cost carrier for 11 years running. To accomplish all of this, we rely heavily on our 22,000 Allstars (employees). As AirAsia co-founder Tony Fernandes likes to say, “it has always been about the people.” 

In my role as CIO, it’s critical that I give our Allstars the tools and technology they need to get their jobs done, while at the same time ensuring that our company’s data is protected and secure. While this is challenging enough in normal circumstances, we’re also in the midst of rapidly moving from legacy on-premises technologies to the cloud. Google Cloud has been a critical partner for us on this journey.

Identity challenges
AirAsia, like many other enterprises, has relied on a legacy on-premises directory for many years. As our company has quickly grown and expanded to new markets and regions, we’ve had to manage multiple servers across a number of on-premises data centers and the public cloud, which has proved costly and time-consuming.

Our Allstars, located all across Asia, need to easily access a number of legacy on-premises apps in addition to a growing number of SaaS apps. As a business, we also needed a more seamless integration between our HR system of record and our identity solution for user provisioning and lifecycle management. Solving these challenges with our existing on-premises directory was simply not feasible for us.

In recent years, we partnered with Google Cloud to help drive our digital transformation, including moving dozens of workloads and apps to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), deploying G Suite as our collaboration and productivity solution for all of our employees, and replacing thousands of Windows laptops with fast and secure Chromebooks.

We brought up our identity concerns with the Google Cloud team, and after a number of conversations, we decided to deploy Cloud Identity, Google’s cloud-based identity, and access management solution, to help address the identity challenges we were facing. 

Why Cloud Identity for AirAsia?
We ended up choosing Cloud Identity for a few key reasons. Here at AirAsia, we are eager to move to the cloud as quickly as possible, and moving identity management to the cloud is a key enabler of this and our broader digital transformation. Managing identities from the cloud also enables us to have a single identity and set of credentials for each employee, which they can use to access all of the applications they need to be productive, both in the cloud and on-premises. 

In addition, deploying Cloud Identity is a key step towards enabling the BeyondCorp (or zero trust) security model, which we feel is the best approach to strengthen our security posture and fight modern threats. Cloud Identity also integrates seamlessly with our existing technologies, which includes not only Google Cloud products like GCP, G Suite, and Chrome OS, but also third-party tools like Citrix, Papercut, and others.

And finally, Cloud Identity offered us significant cost and resource savings. With Cloud Identity in place, our IT department can spend less time worrying about managing multiple on-premises directory servers and can instead focus on delivering value to our Allstar employees.

Enterprises are increasingly seeking out technologies that help them create unique experiences for customers with speed and at scale. At the same time, customers want flexibility when deciding where to manage their enterprise data, particularly when it comes to business-critical applications.

That’s why I’m thrilled that Sprinklr, the unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform for modern enterprises, has partnered with Google Cloud to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and grow awareness among our joint customers. Sprinklr will work closely with our global salesforce, benefitting from our deep relationships with enterprises that have chosen to build on Google Cloud. 

Akin to Google Cloud’s mission to accelerate every organization’s ability to digitally transform their business through data-powered innovation, Sprinklr’s primary objective is to empower the world’s largest and most loved brands to make their customers happier by listening, learning, and taking action through insights. With this strategic partnership now in place, Sprinklr and Google Cloud will go-to-market together with the end-customer as our sole focus.

Traditionally, brands have adopted point solutions to manage segments of the customer journey. In isolation, these may work — but they rarely work collaboratively, even when vendors build “Frankenstacks” of disconnected products. These solutions can’t deliver a 360° view of the customer, and often reinforce departmental silos. All of which creates point-solution chaos.

Sprinklr’s approach is fundamentally different and is the way out of the aforementioned point-solution chaos. As the first platform purpose-built for unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) and trusted by the enterprise, Sprinklr’s industry-leading AI and powerful Care, Marketing, Research, and Engagement solutions enable the world’s top brands to learn about their customers, understand the marketplace, and reach, engage, and serve customers on all channels to drive business growth. 

Sprinklr was built from the ground up as a platform-first solution, designed to evolve and grow with the rapid expansion of digital channels and applications. The results? Faster innovation. Stronger performance. And a future-proof strategy for customer engagement on an enterprise scale.

“Sprinklr works with large, global companies that want flexibility when deciding where to manage their enterprise data and consider our platform a business-critical application,” said Doug Balut, Senior Vice President of Global Alliances, Sprinklr. “Giving our customers the opportunity to manage Sprinklr on Google Cloud empowers them to create engaging customer experiences while maintaining the high security, scalability, and performance they need to run their business.”

To learn more about this exciting partnership and the challenges we jointly solve for customers, check out the recent conversation between Google Cloud’s VP of Marketing, Sarah Kennedy, and Sprinklr’s Chief Experience Officer, Grad Conn. Or read the press release on the partnership.