Cloud transformation and the adoption of modern DevOps technology presents both opportunities and challenges for IT compliance functions. With DevOps style application development, the feedback loop for developers and engineers is much tighter than with traditional application development pipelines, enabling speed and agility of application release cycles. While speedy CI/CD is a critical advantage of DevOps, it also shifts compliance left in the development timeline, and therefore puts pressure on the IT risk & compliance organization to modernize their approach to regulatory compliance as well. With the ongoing shift towards cloud technologies and DevOps, modernization of regulatory compliance is no longer optional for an IT compliance function

Compliance modernization is a broad mandate that spans the way the function is governed; the tools, technology, and analytics it uses; the number and nature of its connections to other parts of the business; verifiability and auditability of the controls’ evidence, the expectations assigned to it; and more.

Public cloud technology is becoming a core part of many industries today, and with this comes some potential risks such as cloud misconfigurations exposing intellectual property, loss of physical control of assets, skillset scarcity around cloud based security and compliance. 

Given the constantly changing risk landscape, it is critical that regulations more closely align to address these risks. As regulations and risks evolve, the aim of a modern compliance function is to help an organization stay compliant as it goes through a digital transformation. As organizations go through digital transformation, IT compliance also needs to transform — via upgrading the technology stack, modifying the business processes and most importantly re-skilling people to become cloud aware.

Today we are releasing the new paper by Google Cloud’s Office of the CISO. In the paper we reveal a new approach for modernizing your compliance approach using modern approaches and Google Cloud toolsets. Your team can leverage the paper to add value to enterprises, both by charting a course to the safe use of cloud technology and by reducing risk through the use of the public cloud.

Read the paper “Assuring Compliance in the Cloud.”

Also, review these related resources:

• “Risk Governance of Digital Transformation in the Cloud“ paper
• “Making Compliance Cloud-native” (episode 14) with Zeal Somani
• Google Cloud Compliance resource center
• Our compliance blueprints: PCI DSS on GKE and GCP FedRAMP Blueprint
• Google Cloud security best practices center

Permodalan Nasional Berhad (PNB) is one of Malaysia’s largest investment institutions with more than RM300 billion ($71 milion) in assets under management. Through our wholly-owned company, Amanah Saham Nasional Berhad (ASNB), we manage 14 funds with a total value of RM235.74 billion ($56.34 million) as of Dec. 31, 2018. 

To expand the range of people who can invest and participate in the economy, our unit trust funds enable the public to invest as little as RM10 ($2.50) into any of our funds. With each investment, unit-holders (a unit-holder is an investor who holds securities of trust) are able to participate in the local and international investment activities managed by PNB and ASNB. They also gain dividends from their investment at the end of the financial year for the funds that they invest in. 

Accelerating access to services with APIs
As chief technology officer for PNB, I lead the retail and asset management technology aspects of the business. My team and I manage the basic IT systems such as email and networks, but also the more exciting and complex IT infrastructures, including investment core systems and data analytics for the unit trust teams.  

In January 2017 (prior to joining PNB), I observed unit holders waiting in a long line just to update their account balances following a dividend announcement. Unit-holders had limited options then: they were required to visit an ASNB branch or one of our agent banks to complete the transaction. When PNB hired me three months later, I was determined to create a self-service balance checker that would reduce our unit-holders’ waiting time. My team first built an application on an Android tablet that communicated to our backend via APIs. Then we constructed a kiosk around this and started our first self-service kiosk. We have built 120 kiosks across Malaysia in six months.

While we made progress in creating new solutions for our unit-holders, we were missing an API management framework to manage our APIs. After extensive market research, we decided on the Apigee API management platform as it was the most suitable platform to build our capabilities for developing and managing APIs. Apigee’s technical capabilities coupled with responsive support from Google Cloud were important factors. Being new to APIs, we value the quick and ready technical support made available to us.  In addition, the secure and flexible system that Apigee offers is critical to us because as a financial institution, security is of paramount importance.

In July 2017, we migrated our retail core system from mainframe base to a modern, cloud-based infrastructure. In August of the same year, a newly developed web portal provided our unit-holders access to their accounts through their mobile devices for the first time. The customer response was very encouraging and uptake has been very high since then. 

The portal uses APIs to enable our 14 million unit-holders to check balances, reinvest, edit their personal information, and access account statements. For now, the portal is only available to unit-holders who pre-register via an in-person onboarding process. We are currently awaiting regulatory direction on electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC) rules that will impact digital onboarding before we can enable access to new unit-holders via their mobile devices.

Creating new channels for financial inclusion
To date, our web portal and APIs have generated approximately RM2 billion (USD500 million) in annual investments. This equates to about five percent of our total yearly investments contributed via the digital platform. While this is encouraging progress, there is much more potential that we can tap into, including the collection and analysis of consumer behavior data. Moving forward, this valuable information will provide insights for us to improve customer experience and fine-tune our offerings. 

A typical bank integration typically takes six months at a high cost. Excluding the governance and compliance approval period, our key APIs can be consumed in under three months, at minimal cost. Banks that use APIs will find ours easy to work with. This simplifies our agent onboarding process. 

APIs enable us to innovate further by expanding our capabilities and reach. We are currently onboarding a few PNB agent banks and we look forward to the possibility to connect to fintech players in Malaysia, especially e-wallet solution providers. API simplify the communications between multiple systems and offer a world of possibilities for our business.

Digital technology offers increasing flexibility and choice to consumers. As a result, the retail industry is dramatically shifting toward more tailored and personalized experiences for shoppers, and businesses are rethinking how they deliver value to customers.

This couldn’t be more true for the beauty retailing industry where leading companies are turning to digital technology to create customized shopping experiences.

At Google Cloud, we’re particularly excited about our work with Ulta Beauty, the largest beauty retailer in the United States with more than 1196 stores in all 50 states, and how the company is using Google Cloud technology solutions to power personalization and redefine beauty retailing.

Established in 1990, Ulta Beauty has had incredible success as a company, and as customers become more discerning and curious about their purchases, the company is finding new ways to meet their changing needs.

Recently, leaders at Ulta Beauty recognized a huge opportunity to complement and enhance the shopping experience by helping beauty enthusiasts navigate through more than 500 brands and 25,000 products carried in their stores and online channel.

They decided to leverage the data from Ulta Beauty’s successful Ultamate Rewards loyalty program to create and offer more unique and personalized user experiences.

With more than 30 million members generating data through sales, transactions, product reviews, and social media engagement, Ulta Beauty’s Loyalty Program creates a comprehensive data set, and the company sought the right technology partner to help organize, analyze and transform that data into valuable insights for its customers.

Ulta Beauty’s leaders knew they had an opportunity to leverage data analytics and machine learning to reach customers in new ways, enhance the guest experience, and continue to grow their active loyalty member base. After considering a number of cloud providers, they chose to expand their existing partnership with Google Cloud.

“Google Cloud listened to our needs and worked in tandem with our engineering team to address our challenges,” said Michelle Pacynski, vice president of digital innovation at Ulta Beauty. “The ease of working with the Google Cloud team and their breadth of experience made the decision a no-brainer, laying the foundation for a great partnership.”  

In 2019, Ulta Beauty announced it was working with Google Cloud Platform to unify and organize its data, using:

• BigQuery to perform data analysis and generate dynamic content, personalized product recommendations, and event-based messages for customers.
• Cloud Storage to provide highly available, secure, resilient and cost-effective access to data across the entire enterprise.
• Compute Engine for the high-performance scalability needed to grow with customer demand while painlessly migrating existing applications to the cloud.
• Anthos to build a hybrid cloud foundation that allows their applications to take advantage of all this data, combining the power and flexibility of GKE with the ability to leverage their existing investment in secure infrastructure on-premises.

Our partnership with Ulta Beauty has enabled increased engagement with customers in store and online, and the creation of new tools and capabilities, including a new Virtual Beauty Advisor tool to deliver tailored recommendations and help shoppers choose the right products, and a Customer Conversation Platform that’s enabling deeper connections with guests, ultimately driving customer loyalty.

“It’s been a really efficient process so far due in part to the ease of working with the Google team,” said Michelle Pacynski, vice president of digital innovation at Ulta Beauty. “They’re experienced, approachable, and their can-do style makes for a great partnership. They listened to our needs and worked in tandem with our engineering team, figuring things out, and getting it done.”

Video AI is a powerful way to enable content discovery and engaging video experiences.

Here, try it out right now!

Google Cloud’s easy-to-access video AI solutions can accomplish a bunch of things. Here are a few:

Precise video analysis: Video Intelligence API automatically recognizes more than 20,000 objects, places, and actions in stored and streaming video. It also distinguishes scene changes and extracts rich metadata at the video, shot, or frame level. Use in combination with AutoML Video Intelligence to create your own custom entity labels to categorize content. Imagine being able to categorise hundreds of videos of customer interactions quickly to improve service training!

Recommended content: Build a content recommendation engine with labels generated by Video Intelligence API and a user’s viewing history and preferences. This will simplify content discovery for your users and guide them to the most relevant content that they want.

Simplify media management: Find value in vast archives by making media easily searchable and discoverable. Easily search your video catalog the same way you search text documents. Extract metadata that can be used to index, organize, and search your video content, as well as control and filter content for what’s most relevant.Imagine being able to locate insight in hundreds of enterprise videos to improve productivity and customer experience!

Easily create intelligent video apps: Gain insights from video in near real time using the Video Intelligence Streaming Video APIs, and trigger events based on objects detected. Build engaging customer experiences with highlight reels, recommendations, interactive videos, and more. Marketers, imagine being able to trigger a customer workflow, in real time, based on a live customer interactions.

Automate expensive workflows: Reduce time and costs associated with transcribing videos and generating closed captions, as well as flagging and filtering inappropriate content.

Content moderation: Identify when inappropriate content is being shown in a given video. You can instantly conduct content moderation across petabytes of data and more quickly and efficiently filter your content or user-generated content.

What can your organisation do with video AI?