Red Hat selects the National Park Foundation as top recipient of 2021 U.S. corporate holiday donation

For the fourteenth year in a row, Red Hatters based in the United States took an active role in selecting a charitable organization to be the beneficiary of our U.S. corporate holiday donation. During the process, more than 140 charities were nominated, and more than 1,100 associates participated in the final vote. This year, we used a cumulative voting approach, which allowed associates to rank their top five organizations from the initial list.
Quelle: CloudForms

Google Cloud Data Analytics 2021: The year in review

As I look back on 2021 I’m proud to see a fast growing number of companies use our data platform to unlock new insights, build new business models and help improve their employees’ and their customers’ experience.Data itself is just inactive information, useless without activation. The true power of data comes when it’s being used to build intelligent applications, help people make better decisions, increase automation and ultimately change how value is being created.This year, tens of thousands of  customers unlocked their data advantage with Google Cloud’s unified data platform. From breaking down data silos, building internet-scale applications, building smart processes with AI, building data meshes that span beyond their enterprise and turn data into an asset.These customers all used Google Cloud’s unified data platform to remove barriers across data silos, accelerate existing analytic investments, and achieve business outcomes faster. I’m truly honored to share some of the most important moments from our partners, customers, and practitioners this year. Thank you for your trust and commitment and for choosing Google Cloud as your innovation partner — to break down silos and turn data into value.One retailer using these solutions is Carrefour, one of the largest grocery retailers in France. Carrefour needed to ensure it had the right products, in front of the right shoppers, at the right store location. With Google Cloud, Carrefour developed an assortment recommendation tool that helped the chain support a more personalized selection at the store level, giving store directors the autonomy to influence inventory needs. The tool also gives Carrefour headquarters visibility into the merchandising decisions by each of their franchise stores.Enabling the real-time enterprise In 2021, more customers looked to shift to real-time data processing and insights with Google Cloud so that they could make decisions at the speed of their business and deliver excellent customer experiences. For example, Twitter’s data platform ingests trillions of events, processes hundreds of petabytes of data, and runs tens of thousands of jobs on over a dozen clusters every day. With this expanded partnership, Twitter is adopting Google’s Data Cloud including BigQuery, Dataflow, Cloud Bigtable and machine learning (ML) tools. These tools not only power the company’s rapidly growing data ecosystem to enable faster data-informed decisions, but also to enable deeper ML-driven product innovation.Another great example is the story of Verizon Media, who switched to the Google Cloud from another provider to ingest 200TB Daily, store 100PB in BigQuery, stream 300MB per second and achieve a 90+% productivity improvement by combining Looker, BigQuery and the rest of our Data Platform.Finally, another great journey is that of ATB Financial who migrated its extensive SAP backbone that supports its 800,000+ customers to Google Cloud, and built a system on BigQuery for real-time data acquisition, enrichment, and AI assisted and self-service analyticsGoing BIG with healthcare and life sciencesHCA Healthcare is using BigQuery to analyze data from its 32 million annual encounters and identify opportunities to improve clinical care. I was particularly pleased about our partnership and how  Sam Hazen, the company’s CEO explained that “Next-generation care demands data science-informed decision support and how he described our partnership and shared passion for ”innovation and continual improvement as foundational to our efforts.”Moderna relies on data to respond to the disproportionate impact the pandemic has had on minority groups, utilizing insights from Looker to increase diversity in their COVID-19 vaccine trials to improve representation. “Looker has a depth to it — it’s not just a visualization that you look at. People can go deeper as they learn more,” Dave Johnson, VP of Informatics, Data Science, and AI at Moderna.We were also incredibly honored to work with the National Cancer Institute’s in order to support breast cancer research with fast and secure data sharing.  Combining our AI Platform and BigQuery to work with large and heterogeneous data, the team was able to successfully demonstrate that “researchers can inexpensively analyze large amounts of data, and do so faster than ever before.”Increasing enterprise agilityNiantic Labs built a globally scalable game for millions of users on Google Cloud. In this video, they share their experience scaling with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Spanner, and describe how their data science team works with BigQuery, Dataflow, and Pub/Sub for their data analytics needs.Finally, Telefónica partnered with Google Cloud to foster Spain’s digital transformation and advance 5G mobile edge computing. As part of this partnership, Google Cloud will launch a new cloud region in Spain to assist the country in economic recovery amidst the COVID-19 crisis. Telefónica will also use Google Cloud services to boost its own digital capabilities—in areas such as machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, and application development—to continue to provide new services and tools to its global customer base. 2021 Data Cloud momentum, thanks to all our customersSome of my favorite customer stories of this year describe how our customers inspired and pushed us to take our products and offerings to new heights. For me, this was most apparent at our inaugural Data Cloud Summit in late May, where we were able to unveil to our customers the latest product and feature announcements of everything having to do with data. We launched Dataplex, allowing customers and users to centrally manage, monitor, and govern data across data lakes, warehouses, and marts – all from one single viewpoint. We also announced Datastream, our serverless change data capture (CDC) and replication service, as well as Analytics Hub, a fully-managed service built on BigQuery that allows our customers to create safe and governable data sharing ecosystems. We’ve made migrations to Cloud SQL easier and faster with the Database Migration Service. More than 85% of all migrations are underway in under an hour, with the majority of customers migrating their databases from other clouds. At Google Cloud Next ‘21, we also had devoted space to share our product improvements and iterations back to our customers. Amidst many announcements, I was most proud to speak about Spark on Google Cloud, the world’s first autoscaling and serverless Spark service for the Google Cloud data platform, BigQuery Omni, our cross-cloud analytics solution, Google Earth Engine on Google Cloud, a launch that brings together Google Earth Engine’s 50+ petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets for planetary-scale analysis, and Spanner PostgreSQL interface, which allows enterprises to take advantage of Spanner’s unmatched global scale, 99.999% availability, and strong consistency using skills and tools from the popular PostgreSQL ecosystem. We also held the sixth edition of JOIN, Looker’s annual user conference which included 3 days of live educational content with over 15 customers and partners participating spanning 5 keynotes, 33 breakouts, 12 how-to’s, 27 Data Circles of Success, and our popular Hackathon. Content focused on activating users with data experiences, composable analytics, and our unifiedsemantic model. All sessions from JOIN are now available on-demand.Tapping into the data ecosystemOne of our customers’ most recurring themes was an interest in expanding their data aperture and tapping into the data ecosystem around them. We addressed this feedback in three main ways. First, we activated an ecosystem for collective intelligence on BigQuery. Now, more than 3,000 organizations shared more than 250 petabytes of data and Google Cloud shared more than 150 public datasets that can be used across a myriad of use cases.Second, We also leaned into this spirit of knowledge sharing by packaging over 30 architecture design patterns which include code, data models, and industry best practices. We’ve also increased industry domain expertise in areas such as retail, financial services, healthcare, and gaming and are continuing to develop industry white papers such as this one – How to develop Global Multiplayer Games using Cloud Spanner to reduce the time to value for customers.Third, we continue to support an open ecosystem of data partners including; Neo4j, Databricks, MongoDB, Informatica, Tableau, and C3.ai giving customers the flexibility of choice to build their data clouds without being locked into a single approach.  Going further than we imagined, togetherWe are incredibly grateful to our customers for choosing Google Cloud to write their data story, and we can’t wait to see what you do next. Learn more about how organizations are building their data clouds with Google Cloud solutions.Related ArticleTurn data into value with a unified and open data cloudAt Google Cloud Next we announced Google Earth Engine with Bigquery, Spark on Google Cloud and Vertex AI WorkbenchRead Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

Cloud CISO Perspectives: December 2021

This is our last Cloud CISO Perspectives of 2021. It’s been an eventful year for the cybersecurity industry, both good and bad, and I welcome the opportunities and challenges we will continue to address together in 2022. In this final post, I’ll share the latest updates from the Google Cybersecurity Action Team, new reports from Google’s security research teams and more information on Google Cloud’s Log4j impact and assessment.Update on Log4j vulnerabilityGoogle Cloud continues to actively follow the evolving security vulnerabilities in the open-source Apache “Log4j” utility and we are providing regular updates to our security advisory page. Responding to these vulnerabilities can be especially stressful, even more so when reaching the end of the year. We encourage everyone using vulnerable versions of Log4j, in any environment, to upgrade as soon as possible and according to guidance published by Apache, found here. As the entire industry works through its response to Log4j, the Google Cybersecurity Action Team also continues to publish and update recommended actions for mitigating exposure to the Log4j vulnerabilities. The state of open source software securityWhat recent events have taught us and will continue to teach us into 2022 is that we owe our thanks to the volunteers and maintainers of open source software. More than ever, we need continued industry investment and commitment to support them.For years, Google has been focused on addressing this challenge. Our open source security team helped found the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). Over the past year, we have doubled down on our investments in open source software security; from tools to frameworks to funding maintainers of open source software projects to focus on security. This past August, we committed $10 billion to advancing cybersecurity for organizations and governments globally where a major part of that commitment is focused on securing the open source software ecosystem, including $100 million in investments to third-party organizations like Linux Foundation and OpenSSF. One of the primary challenges facing defenders at this very moment is simply getting a handle on where Log4j dependencies exist within their organization’s codebases. Our Supply-chain Levels for Software Assurance (SLSA) project, which we open sourced in partnership with the OpenSSF, is an end-to-end framework to manage supply chain integrity and security, and its implementation would greatly aid organizations in this kind of situation. Last week, Google’s Open Source Insights team published an analysis on the impact of the Apache Log4j vulnerability where they pulled together a list of 500 affected packages with some of the highest transitive usage and encouraged maintainers or users helping with the patching effort to maximize impact and unblock more of the community. Improvements such as these could qualify for financial rewards from the Secure Open Source Rewards program. You can explore your package dependencies and their vulnerabilities by using Open Source Insights. We all can do our part to support this critical function of our software ecosystem, and I look forward to seeing how organizations, governments and individuals work together to make improvements in the coming year. Google Cybersecurity Action Team Highlights Below I’ll recap the latest updates, new services and resources across our Google Cybersecurity Action Team, Google Cloud Security product teams and Google security research efforts since our last post. SecurityQ4 Cloud Security Talks Recap: We hosted our final Google Cloud Security Talks event of 2021 where our security teams focused on zero trust and covered everything from Google’s history with BeyondCorp to our strategic thinking when it comes to applying zero trust principles to production environments. We also shared product updates across the portfolio and talked about how zero trust fits into our invisible security vision. Check out the recap in this blog post and watch the sessions virtually on-demand.Autonomic Security Operations: Our Autonomic Security Operations solution continues to resonate with organizations and security professionals widely as teams look for more ways to modernize their security operations. Dr. Anton Chuvakin and Iman Ghanizada from the Google Cybersecurity Action Team recently published a whitepaper on how organizations can work towards a 10x transformation of their SOC. Their first blog post in a series of many looks at what security teams can learn from Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles and philosophies to begin their journey towards modernizing the SOC. ComplianceSoftware-Defined Community Cloud: Our Google Cloud compliance team outlined a new concept for how the industry can address challenges within legacy community cloud implementations. Our Assured Workloads product implements a novel approach to help customers meet compliance and sovereignty requirements through a software-defined community cloud. A software-defined community cloud is designed to deliver the benefits of a community cloud in a more modern architecture. Google Cloud’s approach provides security and compliance assurances without the strict physical infrastructure constraints of legacy approaches.Continuous Compliance: Following the Google Cybersecurity Action Team’s launch of the Risk and Compliance as Code solution, our customer engineering teams shared some timelycase studies on how Google Cloud customers are reaching continuous compliance, encompassing real-time attestation and notification. The key learning: the more familiar control owners become with our GCP capabilities, the more confident they feel to automate their controls.Shared FateSecured Data Warehouse blueprint: Google Cloud customers can jump start the migration and analysis of sensitive business data by using the new Google Cloud Secured Data Warehouse blueprint. This opinionated guidance consists of both documentation and deployable Terraform assets.  It is built around BigQuery and incorporates Cloud DLP, Cloud Storage, PubSub, Dataflow, Data Catalog, and CMEK to implement security best practices across data ingestion, storage, processing, classification, encryption, logging, monitoring and governance. Security Foundations Blueprint v2.5: And we’re excited to announce the next version of our Security Foundations Blueprint. New content provides further control for data residency and also supports Assured Workloads for enhanced native platform guardrails.  We review the guide and corresponding blueprints regularly as we continue to update best practices to include new product capabilities. Controls and ProductsNetwork-based Cloud threat detection with Cloud IDS: We announced the general availability of our Cloud IDS solution that helps enterprises detect network-based threats and helps organizations meet compliance standards that call for the use of an intrusion detection system. With the general availability, Cloud IDS now has the following enhancements: service availability in all regions, detection signatures automatically updated daily and new compliance support for customers’ HIPAA compliance requirements and ISO27001 certification.New zero trust features in BeyondCorp Enterprise: The BCE team released the Policy Troubleshooter feature in general availability. The tool provides support for administrators to triage blocked access events and easily unblock users within an organization, which is an essential tool for admins as employees continue to work remotely or in hybrid and need ways to access corporate resources and information securely. Keyless Authentication from GitHub Actions: Following GitHub’s introduction of OIDC tokens into GitHub Actions Workflows, you can now authenticate from GitHub Actions to Google Cloud using Workload Identity Federation, removing the need to export a long-lived JSON service account key.  New functionality like this is a part of Google Cloud’s ongoing efforts to make security invisible and our platform secure-by-default. Learn more in the blog post. Threat Intelligence Combating cyber crime at scale: In December, Google took action to disrupt Glupteba, a sophisticated botnet targeting Windows machines. This was also the first lawsuit against a blockchain enabled botnet, where the attackers protected itself using blockchain technology. Google’s Threat Analysis Group took steps to detect and track Glupteba’s malicious activity over time and we launched litigation which we believe will set a precedent and help deter future activity. The details in TAG’s analysis and our litigation demonstrate that crime on the internet is sophisticated, and at Google, we feel a responsibility as part of this ecosystem to play a part in disrupting this activity to help everyone on the Internet be safer.iMessage zero-click exploit: In a recent blog post, Google’s Project Zero researchers show for the first time how an in-the-wild zero-click iMessage exploit works and how it is used by NSO. Must-listen podcasts Earlier this month, the Google Cloud Security podcast hit a major milestone: 46 episodes in its first year! Check out this post to see the top themes from our podcast throughout 2021, including episodes on zero trust security, cloud threat detection, how to make cloud migrations more secure and data security in the cloud. This wraps up the year for Cloud CISO Perspectives in 2021! We’ll be back in 2022 with continued updates from our Google Cybersecurity Action Team and more. If you’d like to have this Cloud CISO Perspectives post delivered every month to your inbox, click here to sign-up.Related ArticleCloud CISO Perspectives: November 2021Google Cloud CISO Phil Venables shares his thoughts on the latest security updates from the Google Cybersecurity Action Team.Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform