All news with #google cloud tag

🛡️ This Cloud CISO Perspectives piece from Google Cloud explains why AI-native defensive strategies should be a board-level priority. Authors Chris Betz and Alicja Cade outline how AI Threat Defense (AITD) shifts security from reactive to automated, enabling business speed and resilience. The article offers five governance-focused questions for directors to assess modernization, remediation, consolidation, contextual prioritization, and AI safety.

🔒 Google Cloud announced preview support for Identity and Access Management (IAM) group authentication in AlloyDB, extending an identity-driven, passwordless access model to enterprise database workloads. The feature aligns AlloyDB with Cloud SQL by enabling group-based access controls to reduce individual account sprawl, simplify on- and off-boarding, and improve auditing. It also helps secure AI agents by ensuring actions map to user identities and limiting privilege escalation.

🧭 Today at Next Tokyo, Google Cloud announced enhancements to its borderless Lakehouse built on Apache Iceberg, enabling cross-cloud, zero-copy analytics and federated catalogs. The platform lets Gemini Enterprise and conversational agents query and act on live data across on-prem, AWS, Azure, and major SaaS systems without heavy ETL. New features include catalog federation (preview), Cross-Cloud Interconnects with predictable pricing, intelligent caching, and integration with Knowledge Catalog for unified governance and context.

🗂️ Google Cloud has advanced Conversational Analytics from experiments into enterprise-ready offerings across BigQuery, Looker, and preview support for AlloyDB, Cloud SQL, and Spanner. The platform supports querying data across clouds, Lakehouse and Iceberg catalogs, and integrates into tools like BigQuery Studio, Looker, and Gemini Enterprise. Enterprises gain governance features such as CMEK, VPC, DRZ, and row- and column-level access controls, plus cost and observability tools via OpenTelemetry. Agentic Workflows, anomaly detection, and APIs/SDKs enable embedding conversational agents across applications and workflows.

🔒 Google Cloud Key Management Service (Cloud KMS) now offers general availability support for quantum‑safe digital signatures (ML‑DSA, SLH‑DSA) and ML‑KEM post‑quantum key encapsulation. The release addresses the challenge of signing large payloads by supporting pre‑hash and external‑µ variants to enable efficient HSM and KMS signing workflows. Cloud KMS includes multiple ML‑DSA and SLH‑DSA variants mapped to NIST security categories to help organizations meet emerging standards and regulatory timelines. Developers can manage PQC keys and integrate signing via the Cloud KMS API with documentation and examples provided.

🛡️ Google Cloud announces two native billing features: Early Anomalies for AI services and Spend Caps on Budgets. Early Anomalies monitors daily service-level cost signals, builds dynamic baselines, and issues RCA highlighting top SKUs driving surges. Spend Caps let you set monthly financial caps per project and service that automatically block further billable usage when reached, while preserving data and resources.

🔒 Best Buy eliminated service account key hassles by adopting Google Cloud's Workforce Identity Federation to let developers use their existing Microsoft Entra ID credentials for secure access to BigQuery and other cloud services. This syncless approach removes the need to synchronize user records into Cloud Identity, reduces credential management and attack surface, and delivers auditable, user-level access. The change is largely invisible to developers while simplifying operations for security and platform teams.

🚀 SAP and Google Cloud announced general availability of SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for BigQuery, enabling zero-copy, bi-directional access between SAP Business Data Cloud and BigQuery. The integration exposes SAP tables, metadata, and business semantics directly in BigQuery and Knowledge Catalog to accelerate analytics and agentic AI while reducing data replication and costs. Early adopters report faster data pipelines and improved operational insights.

🌤️ NOAA has selected Google Cloud as the primary provider of high-performance computing for the Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System (WCOSS). This move marks a shift toward cloud-first infrastructure, using H4D VMs powered by fifth-generation AMD EPYC™ processors to support compute-intensive numerical weather prediction. The collaboration builds on years of joint projects in data sharing, wildfire tracking, and advanced modeling, aiming to improve forecast accuracy and public safety.

🤖 Voicify partnered with Google Cloud to transform phone calls into reliable, AI-driven interactions for restaurants and healthcare. By adopting Gemini Enterprise and Vertex AI, the company improved latency, reduced costs, and achieved enterprise-grade security and compliance. Their orchestration platform validates orders against POS systems, handles traffic spikes with provisioned throughput and pay-as-you-go, and shortened client onboarding dramatically. The architecture emphasizes scalability, data integrity, and multicloud availability.

🚀 Checkout.com migrated from a self-hosted Apache Airflow to Google Cloud’s Managed Service for Apache Airflow (Gen 3) to reduce operational overhead and improve reliability. The move eliminated manual patching and scaling, introduced DAG isolation and managed upgrades, and integrated with Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging for better visibility. As a result, the team saw faster deployments, higher stability, and estimated monthly cost savings of ~30%.

🔒 AlloyDB, a PostgreSQL-compatible managed service, now offers columnar engine accelerated HNSW to speed up pgvector vector search. This preview feature pins HNSW indexes in a compressed, in-memory columnar cache to reduce buffer-manager overhead and enable up to 4x higher QPS compared to standard PostgreSQL. The enhancement requires simple flag changes and uses the same pgvector SQL syntax, delivering higher throughput and improved AI recall without application changes.

🔐 In Google Cloud, IAM enforces the Principle of Least Privilege by combining predefined and custom roles with Allow and Deny policies across resource hierarchies. When resource-level bindings are not possible, IAM conditions let you scope broad roles to specific APIs, services, MCP servers, tools, or time windows. Use conditions alongside Deny policies to surgically remove excessive permissions and strengthen defense-in-depth.

🛠️ Panasonic Automotive’s vSkipGen virtualization platform is validated on Google Cloud’s Axion-based C4A-metal, enabling cloud-native development and validation of Cockpit Domain Controller (CDC) software. The solution pairs vSkipGen’s Unified HMI remote GPU offload with support for Android Automotive OS and Android SDV to provide high-fidelity graphics, VirtIO device virtualization, and integration with automotive simulators. C4A-metal delivers high-performance Arm-based bare metal instances optimized for digital twins, accelerated testing, and scalable CI/CD pipelines.

🔎 Google Cloud outlines how to integrate Gemini Enterprise telemetry into BigQuery to enable scalable analytics and governance. The article explains pre-computed dashboards, streaming log sinks, and five partitioned telemetry tables for prompts, model responses, user activity, and audit logs. It highlights BigQuery Conversational Analytics, auto-generated schema documentation, and techniques to build executive dashboards and compliance workflows.

🛡️ This post from Mandiant highlights how publicly exposed serverless applications — often unauthenticated by design — are frequent targets for application-level attacks like LFI/RFI and command injection. It explains exploitation paths including file retrieval and service account token exfiltration, and demonstrates attack examples against Cloud Run Python functions. The article provides actionable hardening guidance such as using dedicated service accounts with least privilege, isolating public services in separate projects, enforcing S‑SDLC practices, and deploying Cloud Armor WAF and Layer 7 load balancing for centralized protection.

🤖 Claude on Google Cloud pairs Anthropic's frontier models with Google Cloud's managed infrastructure, enabling enterprises to run large-scale AI in production. It provides unified IAM, VPC controls, observability, and global, regional, and multi-region endpoints to meet latency and data-residency needs. Built-in model features like prompt caching, streaming, and extended context combine with Google Cloud serving capabilities such as batch prediction and provisioned throughput for cost and performance optimization.

🛡️ Today Google Cloud announced that on July 10 the U.K. Treasury designated Google Cloud EMEA as a critical third party (CTP) to the U.K. financial sector. The designation acknowledges the systemic impact of services used by U.K. firms and places Google Cloud EMEA under direct oversight by the Bank of England, PRA, and FCA. Google Cloud commits to constructive engagement with regulators and to help customers meet operational resilience and third‑party risk requirements.

🔧 Smart Tiered Cache now supports public cloud regions by accepting a user-provided region hint. Cloudflare maps ambiguous anycast or regional unicast origins to the correct cloud region so it can select optimal primary and fallback upper tiers, improving cache efficiency and reducing hairpin latency. The feature is available via dashboard, API, and Terraform and initially supports AWS, GCP, Azure, and Oracle Cloud.

🛡️ Cloud Run sandboxes are now in public preview, offering a native, secure, and ultra-fast runtime to execute untrusted code and agent workloads in milliseconds. These lightweight, isolated execution boundaries can spawn within existing Cloud Run service instances and enforce credential isolation, deny-by-default network egress, and a safe read-only filesystem overlay. Enabling sandboxes requires a single deployment flag and integrates with the Agent Development Kit and ComputeSDK for streamlined use.