We recently announced the general availability of Connected Sheets, which brings you the power and scale of a BigQuery data warehouse in the familiar context of Google Sheets. With Connected Sheets, you can analyze billions of rows and petabytes of data in Sheets without specialized knowledge of computer languages like SQL. This makes it easy for anyone, not just data analysts, to apply pivot tables, charts, and formulas to massive datasets and unlock insights.

Our customers use Connected Sheets to enable data-driven decision-making across their organizations. We’ve heard many stories about how Connected Sheets has enabled them to achieve operational efficiencies and new ways of unlocking the power of their data; we’d like to share a few here.

Operate with agility

Now more than ever, it’s critical for organizations to react with flexibility and agility to new realities. Connected Sheets helps organizations harness and collaborate on massive amounts of data, making it easier to understand and quickly respond to today’s dynamic landscape. 

The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) helps the UN and its partners deliver peace and security, humanitarian, and development solutions. As COVID-19 emerged, UNOPS used Connected Sheets to help coordinate a swift global response. Says Tushar Dighe, Chief Information Officer at UNOPS, “When the COVID-19 pandemic started, we needed to quickly assess the status of our operational capacity in order to assist governments with the response. We used a Connected Sheet with data from our BigQuery data warehouse combined with manual status inputs on the same Sheet, where colleagues in more than 80 countries were able to collaboratively provide inputs. The results in the form of pivots and charts were instantly available live. It took less than three hours to design and implement the solution, and we had status information from more than 80 countries within the first 24 hours.”

Improve business and financial reporting

Reports and dashboards displaying business metrics, like revenue figures or operational KPIs, play a critical role in organizations. These reports help sales teams track performance, enable finance teams to make projections, and provide business leaders with a picture of their organization’s health. Especially now, as businesses adapt their planning to reflect the new normal and employees remain dispersed, it’s doubly important that teams can quickly access and collaborate on business and financial dashboards, from wherever they are. But building and maintaining these reports can be time consuming and error-prone, and requests for changes or new views result in manual work for data analysts. All of this just extends the time to insight and action. 

Connected Sheets helps automate report creation, while maintaining a single source of truth for data in BigQuery. The live connection between BigQuery and Sheets also means that data stays fresh, minimizing the risk that people make decisions based on outdated information and avoiding the data integrity risks of manual data pulls. 

Says Alexander Danilowicz, a Software Engineer at data connectivity company LiveRamp, “Our Finance team uses Connected Sheets to automate reports that are shared with other stakeholders to run the business. This enables our business partners to analyze and create pivot tables on massive datasets, which is not possible in a traditional spreadsheet.”

“Now that it’s all integrated, there’s no human error involved. Changes can be made at the click of a button, resulting in 10 hours saved per month,” he adds.

Track product adoption

It’s important for teams across the business to understand customer adoption of products and services, whether it’s the product team tracking usage of a newly released feature or the support team trying to anticipate incoming service requests. Similarly,  IT teams need to analyze adoption of an organization’s internal applications and systems, so they know what tools employees are using and how they are being used. But product adoption datasets are often too large for traditional spreadsheets to handle, and new data is continuously being added. 

Connected Sheets can provide teams access to large, powerful, and up-to-date usage datasets, in the familiar Sheets interface. PwC, a global professional services organization, uses Connected Sheets as part of its efforts to make technology and data more accessible across its workforce. One way PwC uses Connected Sheets is to monitor and analyze internal adoption of tools like G Suite. 

Says Peter Van Nieuwerburgh, Global Change Manager at PwC, “If you look at our own adoption dashboarding, it’s more than three terabytes of data—good luck putting that in any spreadsheet. With Connected Sheets, we’re not really pulling the data into the spreadsheet, rather it lives in the database where it belongs. The ability to go and so easily analyze and visualize the data is really powerful.”

We hope Connected Sheets helps to scale data-driven decision making at your organization, by making powerful data easily accessible across your sales, finance, product, and IT teams.

In response to the pandemic, an overwhelming 92% of the U.S. workforce is now interested in working in a hybrid or fully remote capacity1. All employers, including government leaders, are now critically focused on finding the right tools and techniques to foster engagement, improve productivity, and strengthen relationships – in-person and virtually – or risk losing and/or retaining top talent.

Creating a positive work environment starts with having the right technology that can provide a variety of meeting tools to make work easier and more productive from any location. Google Workspace enables agency leaders to support their workforce with capabilities to address a variety of needs, from virtual training and learning, to mobilizing emergency response and critical service delivery. Below we’ve highlighted some of our top tips for getting the most out of Google Workspace to make hybrid work more efficient and effective.

Capture meeting agendas in a Google Doc

Create more effective, engaging meetings by attaching an agenda doc to your Google Calendar event and invite your attendees in to comment and review ahead of time. Google Docs, Google Slides, and Google Sheets allow collaborators to leave color-coded comments that can be incorporated into a live video meeting or a face-to-face roundtable meeting.

Engage attendees with interactive features in Google Meet

We’ve added new features to make meetings more interactive and inclusive throughout 2022. New in-meeting reactions, livestream Q&A and polls, and streaming meetings directly to YouTube, and client-side encryption are all coming to Google Meet soon. We’re incorporating Meet directly into Docs, Sheets, and Slides to make it easier to coordinate on projects.

Knowing how to include everyone into a meeting, even while some folks are remote and some are in the office, will be critical to bringing cohesion to the work experience. Government leaders can foster a culture that helps workers be more productive, satisfied, and perhaps even happier with their work lives.

Add focus time to your calendar and see how time is spent

Google Workspace has also introduced product features to promote wellness. This includes focus time on Google Calendar, out of office and do not disturb statuses on Google Chat, or even backgrounds and noise cancellation on Google Meet that allow individuals to separate their home from work. Allowing employees to set boundaries or notify others of working times can help combat work fatigue. Time Insights in Calendar provide individuals with personalized analytics to see how time is spent across meetings and collaborators throughout a week. A secure cloud environment further brings these tools together to create systems of collaboration.

Creating positive outcomes with a culture focused on integrated work environments

The shift to hybrid work has already started leading to more meaningful engagements among all employees. Video calls have connected the new, tech savvy generation of workers with more experienced workers. In a Fedscoop Radio podcast on embracing hybrid-work strategies and tools, Gary Dannoff, Global Google Workspace Strategic Alliance Leader, noted that multigenerational teams with a 25-year age gap between team members are 75% more likely to have positive outcomes than teams with a smaller age span or none. As we return to the office, let’s engage with and support this new culture of cross-cultural, cross-generational, and cross-geographic collaborative environments created by the challenges we all adapted to during the pandemic.

Google Workspace supports a shift toward future-ready workplace cultures while providing the empathy and confidence needed for returning employees. Danoff also explains that to create a “future-proof” culture, you need to shift your mindset towards building a workplace that is future-ready. Using modern technology to foster collaboration in an evolving work environment helps organizations transform how work is done.

Collaborative technology facilitates productivity and constituent engagement

Agencies around the country are embracing the new era of hybrid work. The State of Arizona migrated 36,000 employees to Google Workspace with little disruption to the way people did their jobs. Now, Arizona is planning to expand their platform to support even more departments that require highly regulated data.

To help constituents get back to work, states like Rhode Island and Wisconsin have created Virtual Career Centers that leverage Google Cloud solutions, which includes Google Workspace, where constituents can schedule meetings and video conferences with career coaches, develop and collaborate on resumes using cloud-based document storage, communicate directly with job recruiters, attend virtual job fairs, and apply to open positions.

For more ideas on how to bring a collaborative, innovative culture into the workplace, catch up on content from the Google Workspace Summit.

1 Source: https://www.pwc.com/us/en/library/covid-19/us-remote-work-survey.html#content-free-1-0f39

I’m excited to share our first Cloud CISO Perspectives post of 2022. It’s already shaping up to be an eventful year for our industry and we’re only in month one. There’s a lot to recap in this post, including the U.S. government’s recent efforts to address critical security issues, like open source software security and zero trust architectures. We’ve also released new resources from our Google Cybersecurity Action Team like the Cloud Security Megatrends and the Boards of Directors whitepaper on cloud risk governance. 

Cloud Security Megatrends 

We’re often asked if the cloud is more secure than on-prem (and why) so we shared our answer in a recent blog post. At Google Cloud, security by design is our priority. We’ve long adopted zero-trust principles for our baseline security architectures and built a global network that relies on defense in depth layers to protect against configuration errors and attacks. But security is always evolving and that is why we also take advantage of the following megatrends:

1. Economy of scale: Decreasing the marginal cost of security raises the baseline level of security. 
2. Shared fate: A flywheel of increasing trust drives more transition to the cloud, which compels even higher security and even more skin-in-the-game from the cloud provider.
3. Healthy competition: The race by deep-pocketed cloud providers to create and implement leading security technologies is the tip of the spear of innovation. 
4. Cloud as the digital immune system: Every security update the cloud gives the customer is informed by some threat, vulnerability, or new attack technique often identified by someone else’s experience. Enterprise IT leaders use this accelerating feedback loop to get better protection.
5. Software-defined infrastructure: Cloud is software defined, so it can be dynamically configured without customers having to manage hardware placement or cope with administrative toil. From a security standpoint, that means specifying security policies as code, and continuously monitoring their effectiveness.
6. Increasing deployment velocity: Because of cloud’s vast scale, providers have had to automate software deployments and updates, usually with automated continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) systems. That same automation delivers security enhancements, resulting in more frequent security updates.
7. Simplicity: Cloud becomes an abstraction-generating machine for identifying, creating and deploying simpler default modes of operating securely and autonomically. 
8. Sovereignty meets sustainability: The cloud’s global scale and ability to operate in localized and distributed ways creates three pillars of sovereignty. This global scale can also be leveraged to improve energy efficiency.

If you’re an IT decision maker, pay attention to these megatrends that will continue to drive and reinforce cloud security and will outpace the security of on-prem infrastructure well into the future. 

U.S. Federal government cybersecurity momentum 

• Open source software security: Earlier this month, Google participated in the White House Summit on open source software security. The meeting came at a critical time for the industry following December’s Log4j vulnerabilities and was both a recognition of the challenge and an important first step towards addressing it. The open source software ecosystem is not homogenous, despite the fact that the industry often thinks of or treats it this way. Some of it, like Linux, is highly curated, while other critical software is supported through diffuse communities including technology companies and other stakeholders. There is also a long tail of many other critical projects driven by a dedicated community of maintainers around the world, including Googlers. In light of this reality, we welcomed the chance to share our recommendations to advance the future of open source software security. Some work we’ve done includes founding the Open Source Security Foundation, which has been instrumental already in making security improvements. We’ve also helped drive a number of key security initiatives within the open source community including security scorecards, the SLSA framework to improve the security and integrity of open source packages, and Secure Open Source Rewards to financially incentivize improvements to critical open source security projects.  
• OMB’s Federal zero trust strategy: The publication of the Office of Management and Budget’s zero trust architecture strategy marks an important step for the U.S. federal government’s efforts to modernize under Executive Order 14028. Google Cloud supports this approach, which recognizes the immense security benefits offered by modern computing architectures. For the past decade, Google has successfully applied zero trust principles through our BeyondCorp and BeyondProd frameworks for providing end-user access and securing our cloud workloads. And we’ve brought these best practices from our own journey to global governments and businesses of any size through solutions like BeyondCorp Enterprise and capabilities like Binary Authorization and Anthos Service Mesh, which are embedded in Anthos, our managed application platform. For Federal agencies embarking on this zero trust journey, the Google Cybersecurity Action Team will offer our expertise by conducting Zero Trust Foundations strategy workshops, which can help organizations in the public and private sectors develop actionable and achievable strategies and plans for zero trust implementation. 

Google Cybersecurity Action Team Highlights 

Here are the latest updates, products, services and resources across our security teams this month: 

Security

• Democratizing security operations: We recently announced that Siemplify, a leading security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) provider, is joining Google Cloud to help companies better manage their threat response. Providing a proven SOAR capability with Chronicle’s approach to security analytics is an important step forward in our vision to advance invisible security and democratize security operations for every organization.
• Security by design: The Highmark Health security team is using “secure-by-design” techniques to address the security, privacy, and compliance aspects of its Living Health solution with Google Cloud’s Professional Services Organization (PSO). Google has long advocated for and followed security by design principles, which is why we’re continuously building enhanced security, controls, resiliency and more into our cloud products and services. 
• Secure collaboration for hybrid work environments: The Google Workspace team shared its recommendations for businesses as they prepare for the future of work,  where the hybrid/flexible work model is becoming standard practice and a new approach to security is essential.
• Anthos Policy Controller CIS Benchmark enforcement: A big part of our shared fate philosophy is to build secure products and not just security products. A recent example of this in action is embedding CIS benchmark policy conformance in the Anthos Policy Controller. We believe the more we embed approaches like this into our products, the more application and infrastructure teams can intrinsically embed security at the start and reduce toil for the security team.
• DevOps for technology-driven organizations and startups: A key success factor for many security programs is the partnership and integration with development teams, and there are some great resources and lessons in our DORA research.
• Security by design with Chrome OS: ABN AMRO’s Asia-Pacific region team recently shared how they are using Chrome OS and CloudReady to work securely in the cloud, reduce total cost of ownership, and add flexibility for employees. This is a great example of secure by design principles in the use of Chromium.

Risk & Compliance

• Boards of Directors summary guide to cloud risk governance: The latest whitepaper from the Google Cybersecurity Action Team outlines how boards of directors can prioritize safe, secure, and compliant adoption processes for cloud technologies within their organizations.  
• TruSight Risk Assessment of Google Cloud: TruSight recently released a comprehensive
  risk assessment report on Google Cloud. Our Enterprise Trust team collaborated on this robust assessment of Google Cloud services to validate the design and implementation of controls. TruSight’s risk assessment of our security controls will help customers accelerate and complete their risk management due diligence.
• Data governance: Check out this new blog series on data governance where our teams explain the role of data governance, its importance, and the necessary processes to run an effective data governance program. Implementing data governance will help maximize value derived from business data, build user trust, and ensure compliance with required security measures.

Controls and Products

• Encrypting Data Fusion: To help meet the security, privacy and compliance requirements of customers in regulated industries like finance or public sector, we announced the general availability of Customer Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK) integration for Cloud Data Fusion, which enables encryption of both user data and metadata at rest with a key that customers can control through our Cloud Key Management Service (KMS). 

Don’t forget to sign-up for our newsletter if you’d like to have our Cloud CISO Perspectives post delivered every month to your inbox. We’ll be back next month with more updates and security-related news.

Founded in 1930 and headquartered in Jordan, Arab Bank is one of the oldest banks in the Middle East. Operating out of 28 countries, we’ve earned our customers’ trust with a prudent approach to operations and respect for the cultures and customs in the region. 

With a few exceptions where cloud providers have hosted their datacenter in a Middle Eastern or North African country, the banking sector, in general, in the region has been slow to adopt cloud technology for a number of reasons, including concern about data security, maturity and security controls of cloud services (PaaS and SaaS), and regulations in place. But on the other hand, we saw the opportunity to accelerate our development and testing using the cloud, as well as to partner with the fintech community and digital service providers to integrate their solution in the banking ecosystem. We needed more flexibility to connect with the outside world, and a more open architecture to help us drive our internal innovation at a faster rate with the help of the fintech industry. By collaborating with Google Cloud, we reached those goals and accelerated app development and testing through products like Apigee and Anthos. We’re now offering innovative apps and services to our customers and employees that leverage new technological capabilities to give more agility and flexibility, and to optimize our workloads.

Embracing the cloud in a regulated industry 

To get started with the cloud, we needed to create internal awareness about cloud technology, the API layer, containers and their benefits amongst our leaders and staff. Google helped us educate and get buy-in from key functions by organizing open technology demonstration sessions and discussion panels. When considering potential cloud providers we had four decision criteria: maturity of security controls, ease of use, cost, and scalability / agility for new deployments and continuous innovation. This last factor was critical, and we were impressed by Google Cloud’s innovation roadmap, both via direct conversations and at Google’s Next conference, where we met a lot of people passionate about technology, innovation and building something new.  

Going back to our journey, given the above-mentioned regional limitations, we started to develop a hybrid cloud approach. This helped us continue to operate on-premises for a number of services in production, particularly those that have personally identifiable information (PII) or other sensitive data attached, and to leverage the cloud for development, testing and production workloads that don’t contain customer data. 

In the short term, we didn’t anticipate that our many jurisdictions would allow data to be transported to other countries. But cloud tools will allow us to tokenize or anonymize customer data while maintaining customer data on-premises. This applies to many digital journeys such as customer onboarding, credit facility online applications, or marketplace navigation. In the coming years, we predict our API integration with partners will accelerate and enrich the overall digital value proposition of our business segments, namely consumer banking, small and medium-size businesses and large corporate and institutional clients. 

Building connections and cornerstones in the cloud

The first move in our digital transformation was to implement Apigee, Google Cloud’s API management platform, to connect to the world’s digital banking ecosystem. Apigee provides the security, sharing, mediation policies, and developer portal capabilities for us to successfully meet Open Banking standards while focusing on innovation.  

On the back of the Apigee implementation, we created an accelerator program to incubate Fintech ideas that can, in turn, integrate into our digital platforms and be offered to our customers. We also developed various banking APIs, all designed and documented in accordance with PSD2 and Open Banking regulations, and made them available to our partners. These APIs exposed on our API development portal offer the needed code structure for fintech companies to design creative solutions around them.

Next, we adopted Anthos, Google Cloud’s managed application platform. Anthos has become a cornerstone of our operations because it works across hybrid cloud, offering integration of microservice containers and fueling collaborative opportunities with external parties. Our current Anthos infrastructure includes several hundreds of  microservices now running on containers in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and on-premises. We now use the cloud for collaboration, development and testing, but not for production, which is done on-premises. 

Along the way, Google Cloud’s Professional Services Organization (PSO) helped us through the entire cloud setup process, and with the adoption of Anthos. We originally built on the cloud tools through an iterative process, learning from our successes and errors along the way. Now that we have a better sense of how Anthos operates, we’re building a fresh infrastructure atop a sound, stable, and resilient foundation that will let us scale easily as we work to transform Arab Bank into a digital-first enterprise, that is our ambition. 

Currently products running on Anthos include customer acquisition and onboarding via mobile apps, and our Arabi-Pay app, which allows customers to instantly pay each other via WhatsApp or other messaging platforms. Leveraging Anthos, our instant loan service for Arab Bank salaried employees can grant and disburse loans up to $7,000 in less than seven minutes.

In addition, we’ve built a number of digital journeys for our Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) customers, such as our SME client digital onboarding process and paperless SME lending platform.

While some may think that digital adoption in this part of the world can be slow, as customer contact remains anchored in our customs, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital banking services and electronic payments, inspiring more confidence to buy and pay online. Thanks to our rich and user-friendly banking app that relies on Apigee and Anthos for critical customer journeys, over 90% of new-to-bank customers are using our mobile apps. Within the next 18 months, we predict that number will be closer to 100%. 

Of course, with higher customer adoption comes the challenge of potential service interruptions. A single moment of downtime can be highly visible to many digital customers. But Google Cloud’s Anthos and Apigee give us the flexibility to resume processes at a fast rate, so any interruptions are almost invisible to our customers. In fact, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, though our branches could be open only for limited hours each day, our consumer clients in particular were able to take advantage of our digital services in a very self-sufficient manner. Being well positioned with Google Cloud, we could also keep our internal teams and external partners connected and productive. Without Google Cloud, continuing the digital transformation of the bank at the pace we wanted would have been a big challenge. 

Collaborating across borders and time zones

With Google Cloud, our ability to collaborate and partner has transformed significantly. We operate 24/7 now because our developers are scattered across multiple geographies and different time zones. Because testing and deployment can run around the clock, including on weekends, we currently deploy a new digital journey in a few weeks, faster than ever before. This has given our organization a spirited mindset that prioritizes innovation, and raised the bar in terms of our operating model.  

Another consideration about Google Cloud tools is the elimination of inefficient processes typically seen in a software development lifecycle. We now build in a completely agile manner, from design squads until deployment in production. Compared to where we were two years ago, when we had an annual maximum of two systems releases in production, we now have close to monthly releases of our digital packages. In addition, we also  supplement those monthly releases with additional ad-hoc releases and fixes in between. As a result, we have removed internal silos and improved tremendously the collaboration between the product and sales teams, operations, IT Dev Factory and Infrastructure, as well as our supporting functions.

Through the agile process facilitated by APIs, we introduced Design Thinking workshops involving external customers and prospects early on to understand their true pain points better and emotions during the existing journeys and how to make new digital journeys frictionless. As a result, the relevance of our products for various customer personas has improved tremendously. 

Transcending banking 

With Google Cloud, we can offer our customers so much more than just banking. We’ve become more digitally relevant to their lives. For example, we recently launched a mortgage app that helps customers all the way from home selection through mortgage negotiations and closing, and even to getting the home decorated. It’s an end-to-end journey in which API integration with key regional players was a cornerstone to our success. 

For other digital products, we have an extensive roadmap of lifestyle-based solutions relevant to each segment and age group. We’ve only scratched the surface of the services we can provide, and we see the cloud as the future for everything we want to do.

Read more about Google Cloud’s Open Banking solution to learn how you can simplify and accelerate the process of delivering open banking as required by PSD2. You can also view our video on Open Banking, powered by Apigee API Management.