The software development process requires complex, cross-functional collaboration while continuously improving products and services. Our customers who build software say that they value Google Workspace for its ability to drive innovation and collaboration throughout the entire software development life cycle. Developers can hold standups and scrums in Google Chat, Meet, and Spaces, create and collaborate on requirements documentation in Google Docs and Sheets, build team presentations in Google Slides, and manage their focus time and availability with Google Calendar.

Development teams also use many other tools to get work done, like tracking issues and tasks in Atlassian’s Jira, managing workloads with Asana, and incident management in PagerDuty. One of the benefits of Google Workspace is that it’s an open platform tailored to improve the performance of your tools by seamlessly integrating them together. We’re constantly expanding our ecosystem and improving Google Workspace, giving you the power to push your software development even further.

Make software development more agile

Google Workspace gives you real-time visibility into project progress and decisions to help you ship quality code fast and stay connected with your stakeholders, all without switching tools and tabs. By leveraging applications from our partners, you can pull valuable information out of silos, making collaborating on requirements, code reviews, bug triage, deployment updates, and monitoring operations easy for the whole team. This allows your teams to stay focused on their priorities while keeping everyone aligned, ensuring collaborators are always in the loop.

Plan and execute together

When combined with integrations, Google Workspace makes the software development planning process more collaborative and efficient. For example, many organizations use Asana—a leading work management platform—to coordinate and manage everything from daily tasks to cross-functional strategic initiatives. To make the experience more seamless, Asana built integrations so users can always have access to their tasks and projects with Google Drive, Gmail, and Chat. With these integrations for Google Workspace, you can turn your conversations into action and create new tasks in Asana—all without leaving Google Workspace.

“We’ve seen exceptional, heavy adoption of tasks being created from within the Gmail add-on. Our customers and community have also shown very strong interest in future development work, which is something we’ll continue to prioritize.” Strand Sylvester, Product Manager, Asana

To date, users have installed the Asana for Gmail add-on over 2.5 million times, as well as over 3.8 million installs of the Asana for Google Workspace add-on for Google Drive.

Start coding quickly

Google Workspace makes it easy for product managers, UX designers, and engineers to agree on what they’re building and why. By bringing all stakeholders, decisions, and requirements into one place—whether it’s a Gmail or Google Chat conversation, or a document in Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides—Google Workspace removes friction, helping your teams finalize product specifications and get started right away.

Integrations like GitHub for Google Chat make the entire development process fit easily into a developer’s workflow. With this integration, teams can quickly push new commits, make pull requests, do code reviews, and provide real-time feedback that improves the quality of their code—all from Google Chat.

Speed up testing

Integrations like Jira for Google Chat accelerate the entire QA process in the development workflow. The app acts as a team member in the conversation, sending new issues and contextual updates as they are reported to improve the quality of your code and keep everyone informed on your Jira projects.

Ship code faster

Developers use Jenkins—a popular open-source continuous integration and continuous delivery tool—to build and test products continuously. Along with other cloud-native tools, Jenkins supports strong DevOps practices by letting you continuously integrate changes into the software build.

With Jenkins for Google Chat, development and operations teams can connect into their Jenkins pipeline and stay up to date by receiving software build notifications directly in Google Chat.

Proactively monitor your services

Improving the customer experience requires capturing and monitoring data sources to improve application and infrastructure observability. Google Workspace supports DevOps teams and organizations by helping stakeholders collaborate and troubleshoot more effectively. When you integrate Datadog with Google Chat, monitoring data becomes part of your team’s discussion, and you can efficiently collaborate to resolve issues as soon as they arise.

The integration makes it easy to start a discussion with all the relevant teams by sharing a snapshot of a graph in any of your Chat spaces. When an alert notification is triggered, it allows you to notify each Chat space independently, precisely targeting your communication to the right teams.

Improve service reliability

Orchestrating business-wide responses to interruptions is a cross-functional effort. When revenue and brand reputation depends on customer satisfaction, it’s important to proactively manage service-impacting events. Google Workspace supports response teams by ensuring that urgent alerts reach the right people by providing teams with a central space to discover incidents, find the root cause, and resolve them quickly.

PagerDuty for Google Chat empowers developers, DevOps, IT operations, and business leaders to prevent and resolve business-impacting incidents for an exceptional customer experience—all from Google Chat. See and share details with link previews, and perform actions by creating or updating incidents. By keeping all conversations in a central space, new responders can get up to speed and solve issues faster without interrupting others.

Accelerate developer productivity

Integrating your DevOps tools with Google Workspace allows your development teams to centralize their work, stay focused on what’s important—like managing their work—build code quickly, ship quality products, and communicate better during service impacting incidents. For more apps and solutions that help centralize your work so you and your teams can connect, create, and get things done, check out Google Workspace Marketplace, where you’ll find more than 5,300 public applications that integrate directly into Google Workspace.

Over the last decade, financial service organizations have been adopting a cloud-first mindset. According to InformationWeek, lower costs and enhanced scalability were the biggest drivers for cloud adoption in financial services, and cloud-native applications allow access to the latest technology and talent, enabling adopters to rebuild transaction processing systems capable of supporting very high volumes and low latency.

Both Neo4j and Google Cloud have been using relationship-based data representations since the beginning, and we’re dedicated to using this technology to help financial services customers drive business transformation. We are excited about the prospects of financial services (FinServ) cloud systems and believe that graph data in the cloud can help solve significant challenges in the industry.

Data Challenge #1: Risk Management and Compliance

First among the top concerns for any CIO moving to the cloud is risk management and compliance. Disconnected, uncontextualized, or stale data create opportunities for fraud and financial crimes to occur. The fact is when it comes to FinServ, the question is not “if” but rather how often an attack will occur.  Unfortunately, incidents have been trending upward over the last decade, and COVID has only exacerbated this reality. Financial crimes affect the bottom line both in the remediation of these crimes and in intangibles like brand value.  

Add to this the complexity of international banking, which makes “compliance” a moving target. Penalties due to noncompliance are a constant concern to any FinServ organization.

The tabular representation of information with a fixed number of columns that never change prevents a description of an ever changing world with changing characteristics. Relational databases are great if the world you describe does not move fast but have limitations when data structures are highly interlinked and not homogeneous.

Neo4j Aura on Google Cloud provides a foundation for creating dynamic, futureproof, scalable applications that adhere to the security standards and protocols today’s financial services organizations require to meet the challenges of finding and preventing bad actors. This also includes enterprise scalability; reaching over 1 Billion nodes and relationships to streamline queries and provide solutions that meet regulatory and privacy compliance across geographies. Neo4j has helped some organizations save billions of USD in fraud in the first year of deployment alone.  

What makes graph technology the best choice for fraud detection use cases is that the relationships between the data-points are as important as the data-points themselves. Let’s take as an example, one John Smith approaches a multi-national banking institution to manage the primary account for his new holding corporation.  

While no one has any record of John R Smith Holdings LLC, the bank’s application built on graph technology understands that there are several well-known entities owned by John Smith Holdings. The application also identifies several well-known board members who bank with this institution. Due to this relationship-driven approach, the bank now understands John R Smith is not “John Smith,” who previously attempted to open an account for his holding corporation, which had no information associated with it prior to two months ago.

Data Challenge #2 Manual Processes and Inefficiencies 

The ubiquity of the cloud offers an opportunity to deploy automation at unprecedented levels to tackle the errors and inefficiencies that manual processing allows to creep into processes. When data comes from disparate, perhaps legacy systems – which may have become siloed and “untouchable” over the years – further complexity arises. As an example, if someone in sales types “John Smith” into a CRM system not knowing that John R Smith is the spelling in the customer data master, it may result in two separate and potentially conflicting records. Being able to join those records together in a mastered view helps to solve this problem. In addition, low data quality equates to an increase in risk, costs, and implementation times for new systems. 

Neo4j Aura on Google Cloud provides automation and artificial intelligence (AI) that reduces manual processes and the errors that accompany them. In this graph architecture each node, which can represent a person, will have labels, relationships, and properties associated with it. This allows for the use of AI which can easily understand that John Smith in the CRM is the same John R Smith in the customer master. The information contained in Neo4j can be connected bi-directionally to ensure consistency across applications and data sources. 

One of the benefits of this approach is that linking information allows organizations to keep the full value of the data, rather than forcing the data into predetermined tabular representations, with the risk of losing valuable information and insights.

Data Challenge #3: Customer Engagement and Insight

Another significant concern is the high expectations today’s customers have for every interaction. End users are accustomed to predictable experiences on their digital devices, and FinServ apps are no exception. Added to this, the “Covid economy” has driven digital adoption significantly across demographics; even among customers who might traditionally have used in-person services. This also equates to increased expectations for personalized, predictable experiences with every digital interaction. We know that latency has always been a key consideration for financial trading, but a recent ComputerWeekly study showed that every financial organization should ensure their visible latency is at 10 milliseconds or less. Customers no longer accept their broadband is at fault.

Finally, blind spots in the customer journey often result in dissatisfaction, which ultimately leads to increased churn. Without gaining actionable insights from your customers, there is no room to innovate and iterate on what they are looking for in your products and services. And this translates to losing market share and competitive advantage.

The NoSQL architecture, specifically the dynamic schema and structure of Neo4j Aura gives you the ability to take charge of your data and make changes according to your development cycles or newer data models. This equates to faster builds, more comprehensive releases and a wider, richer data-set that can be contextualized and understood instantly. Graph technology is the logical choice for building a Customer 360 application. Under this approach organizations not only get valuable insight into the individual client’s behavior and patterns, but also those of their family, friends and colleagues. This allows for stronger personalization, targeted campaigns and successful execution, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and retention levels.

Graph Technology on Google Cloud

Neo4j is a recognized leader in graph database technology and the only fully integrated graph solution on Google Cloud, helping to fill a common need for Google Cloud customers. Both Neo4j and Google Cloud are invested in continuing to grow our partnership and mutual product direction.  

You can find and deploy the Neo4j graph database straight from the Google Cloud marketplace, whether you want to download the software for an on-premises deployment, use the virtual machine image, or use the hosted solution, Aura on Google Cloud, the graph database-as-a-service. In any deployment, you get the same enterprise-grade scalability, reliability, and connectivity along with successful, repeatable use cases you can rely on to resolve your particular challenges and integrated billing. 

For a real-world example of how graph technology can optimize financial services, you can read our Case Study with fintech Current. Current, a leading U.S. financial technology platform with over three million members, used Neo4j Aura on Google Cloud to create a personalization engine based on client relationships. 

To learn more about Neo4j Aura on Google Cloud for FinServ organizations, register for our webinar on Thursday, December 16 with Jim Webber, Chief Scientist, CTO Field Ops at Neo4j and Antoine Larmanjat, Technical Director, Office of the CTO, Google Cloud. 

Click here to Register

Enterprise application teams need to manage more than just containers in their software supply chain. That’s why we created Artifact Registry, a fully-managed service with support for both container images and non-container artifacts.

Artifact Registry improves and extends upon the existing capabilities of Container Registry, such as customer-managed encryption keys, VPC-SC support, Pub/Sub notifications, and more, providing a foundation for major upgrades in security, scalability and control. While Container Registry is still available and will continue to be supported as a Google Enterprise API, going forward new features will only be available in Artifact Registry, and Container Registry will only receive critical security fixes.

Below, we’ll highlight the key improvements Artifact Registry provides over Container Registry, as well as the steps to start using it today.

A unified control plane for container, OS and language repositories

Artifact Registry includes more than just container images: as a developer, you can store multiple artifact formats, including OS packages for Debian and RPM, as well as language packages for popular languages like Python, Java, and Node. In addition, you can manage them all from a single, unified interface. 

A more granular permission model with Cloud IAM

Artifact Registry comes with fine-grained access control via Cloud IAM. Unlike Container Registry, this allows you to control access on a per-repository basis, rather than all images stored in a project. This enables you to scope permissions as granularly as possible, for example to specific regions or environments as necessary.

Repositories in the region of your choice

Artifact Registry supports the creation of regional repositories, which allows you to put your artifacts and data directly in the location that they’ll be used, allowing for higher availability and speed. In Container Registry, you’re limited to “multi-regions”: for example, the closest multi-region for Australia is Asia. However, with Artifact Registry’s regional support, you can create a repository directly in the Sydney data center.

A pricing model that respects your region

While Artifact Registry’s pricing is still based on a combination of network egress and storage usage, support for regional repositories means that you can choose in what region to host your container repositories. Although per unit storage costs are higher for Artifact Registry, optimizing the locations of your repositories to be hosted in the same region where they are used can result in cost savings, because any network traffic within the same region is not considered egress and is thus free.

Part of a secure supply chain

Artifact Registry was designed from the ground up to integrate into our suite of secure supply chain products. This means that it can optionally use Container Analysis to scan your container images for vulnerabilities as they’re uploaded to Artifact Registry, and works directly with Binary Authorization to secure your deployments.

We’re here to help you migrate

If you already use Container Registry, you can take advantage of all the current and upcoming features of container image storage with Artifact Registry by migrating to it. To help, we’ve prepared the following guides:

• Transitioning from Container Registry provides an overview of how to use Artifact Registry instead of Container Registry in a backwards-compatible way
• Copying images from Container Registry guide you to move container images from an existing repository to an Artifact Registry repository

If you’re currently hosting your container images with a third party, you can begin using Artifact Registry directly, by following the instructions in our guide, Migrating containers from a third-party registry, which shows you how to avoid rate limits on image pulls or third-party outages which can disrupt your builds and deployments.

And if you’re just getting started storing container images, you can begin using Artifact Registry as your image repository right away. To learn how, check out Artifact Registry quickstart for Docker, a guide to using Artifact Registry as a single location for managing private packages and Docker container images.

Join our community 

Our Artifact Registry communities are also great resources to help answer your questions and for guidance on best practices: 

• Ask questions on Stack Overflow using the google-artifact-registry tag
• Visit the Google Cloud Slack community and ask a question in the #artifact-registry channel. If you haven’t already joined the Slack community, use this form to sign up.