Building a new data center in Singapore

Our August Talks at Google roundup: the ultimate spectator sport

Fairness matters: Promoting pride and respect with AI

Making it easier to discover data in Search

Start your day on a high note with musical alarms on the Google Clock app

We need to embrace technological breakthroughs

Shall we dance? Using technology to explore new art

Browse the web in VR: Chrome launches on Daydream View

Preparing for a BeyondCorp world: Understanding your device inventory

In my last post, I discussed the key first steps in moving to a system of trust based on people and devices, rather than one based on networks. We do this at Google, and it didn’t just spring up overnight, it took the work of many teams over many years. Today, I’ll go into more detail on what we did and why, with an eye toward how you can prepare your own company to move to a context-based access world.

Know your devices

First, you want to get an authoritative list of all the computers your employees are using. This is probably already contained in your existing management tools, whether Active Directory or others, and if you’re like us, it might actually be spread across multiple tools. You may have procurement or asset tracking systems that know about devices based on purchase and end-of-life cycles. Then, you have active management through centralized systems such as Active Directory. On top of that you might be using local tools to get data about current machine state, such as OS Query. Add to the mix your support and troubleshooting tools, network logs and access point records, and certificate authorities, and you could be looking at 10 or more sources of data about a single device.

Do they all agree? Probably not. Now the challenging part starts.

To infer trust from device state, you’ll need to have some confidence in your device data. Inevitable disagreements between these different systems will require you to establish policies about integrating, corroborating and resolving conflicts in the pipeline. Which specific fields matter most? Which are the most authoritative for you? What happens when you can’t get all the data you want?

Start with new devices

All of the data collection has to start somewhere, so identify your earliest process that can bring you complete and reliable data about devices, and go from there through the lifecycle. What’s the first thing that happens with a new machine? Where is it touched, which systems interact with it, and what will be tracked or reported earliest?

Next, you should consider what information matters most to you about these devices. This will be a process of setting policies with Security and IT teams, to settle on key items, possibly including:

• Who bought it?

• When did it last check in?

• When was it last patched?

• Is the screen lock or password set?

• Is the disk encrypted?

• What’s installed on it?

• Do you still have it (e.g., not stolen or lost)?

Once you have a short list of key data, and you understand where it comes from, you can figure out your process to handle data problems. Human errors, reporting gaps, or even third-party shenanigans with MAC address or serial number re-use can cause inconsistencies or conflicts, and you’ll need clear policies to handle them.

All of this will likely require change at various parts of your organization, from teams to process, so you’ll want to roll out gradually. Figure out what works and what doesn’t, and put in place ways to debug when data are wrong or trust decisions are made incorrectly.

If it feels like a lot of work, start small, getting your systems with the most device coverage. Whip them into shape, so that they give you reliable and accurate information, and then look for integration points with other systems so you can start corroborating information and basing the master data on more than one source. With a clear picture of your fleet, you can start to make access and authorization decisions with more confidence, and shift to access anywhere, based on context.

More to come

More insights on our best practices for bringing context-based access to your organization are on their way. In the meantime, if you haven’t already, I recommend reading our previous post on BeyondCorp or browsing through the resources on our website.

by via The Keyword

Empowering female founders in tech: the future is inclusive

Icebergs, Goldfish and water on Mars: searches that floated to the top this week

Whether your town’s new neighbor turned out to be a bit icy, or your usual afternoon snack was disrupted by an unexpected recall, this week was full of surprises. Here are a few of the top search trends from this week, with data from the Google News Lab.

We’ll never let go

An 11 million-ton iceberg has parked itself outside a fishing village in Western Greenland, causing search interest in “Greenland iceberg” to float 190 percent higher than the commonly-searched “Titanic iceberg.” This icy mountain has stirred up the most search interestin New Zealand, Canada and Australia.

Oh my Mars

For years, scientists have been thirsty to find life on Mars, and—at long last—a lake of liquid water was detected this week. The discovery prompted a 4,000 percent increase in searches for “frozen lake on mars” as well as questions like, “What does water on Mars mean?” and “Is the water found on Mars salt water?” Search usually revolves around the sun, but this week Mars interrupted its orbit with a 95 percent bump in search interest.  

Snack time

This week, more than 3 million packages of Goldfish and 16+ varieties of Ritz Cracker products are being recalled over the possible salmonella contamination of whey powder. Salty snack lovers are wondering, “Are Goldfish crackers bad for you?” “Is it OK to eat Goldfish?” and the question that’s been on my mind for years, “Why do rainbow Goldfish taste different?” Of the top “food recall” related searches this year, Goldfish and Ritz crackers both make the top five, joined by romaine lettuce, egg and Spam.

Who let the dogs out?

Last week, over 360 Golden retrievers met in Scotland to celebrate the breed’s 150th anniversary. The breed may have been born in 1868, but these pups aren’t in their golden years just yet. Labrador retriever, bulldog and pitbull are the top searched dog breeds this week (plus golden retrievers, of course). Though the meeting of the retrievers happened in Scotland, the U.S. and Canada were the countries with the most searches for “golden retrievers.”

No freestyle for a while

You probably know that Ryan Lochte is a 12-time Olympian, but you may also be wondering “What did Ryan Lochte do?” (a top-searched question this week). Well, he posted a picture with an intravenous vitamin drip in his arm that resulted in the 1,400 percent spike in searches for “ryan lochte photo.” Because of the photo, he was found in violation of anti-doping rules, leading to a 14-month ban from swimming.

by via The Keyword

What a week! 105 announcements from Google Cloud Next '18

Google Cloud Next ‘18 was incredible! From fantastickeynotes and fireside chats to GO-JEK CTO Ajey Gore appearing on-stage on a scooter to listening to Target CIO Mike McNamara we had an inspiring, educational and entertaining week at our flagship conference. We were joined by over 23,000 leaders, developers and partners from our Google Cloud community, listened to more than 290 customer speakers share their stories of business transformation in the cloud and took part in hundreds of breakout sessions. The theme of the conference was Made Here Together, and we’re so grateful to everyone who attended and contributed to help build the cloud for everyone.  

But the week of Next wouldn’t be complete without a comprehensive list of what happened. So without further ado, here are 105 product and solution launches, customer stories and announcements from Next ‘18.

Customers

1. eBay—The world’s largest global marketplace is leveraging Google Cloud in many different ways, including experimenting with conversational commerce with Google Assistant, building ML models with Cloud TPUs for image classification, and applying AI to help buyers quickly find what they’re looking for.

2. GO-JEK—This ride-hailing and logistics startup in Jakarta uses Google Cloud to support its hundreds of thousands of concurrent transactions, Maps for predicting traffic and BigQuery to get data insights.

3. Lahey Health—Lahey’s journey to the cloud included migrating from four legacy email systems to G Suite in 91 days.

4. LATAM Airlines—South America’s largest airline uses G Suite to connect teams, and GCP for data analytics and creating 3D digital elevation models.

5. LG CNS—LG is looking to Google Cloud AI, Cloud IoT Edge and Edge TPU to build its Intelligent Vision inspection tool for better quality and efficiency in some of its factories.

6. HSBC—One of the world’s leading banking institutions shares how they’re using data analytics on Google Cloud to extract meaningful insights from its 100PB of data and billions of transactions.

7. The New York Times—The newest way the New York Times is using Google Cloud is to scan, encode, and preserve its entire historical photo archive  and evolve the way the newsroom tells stories by putting new tools for visual storytelling in the hands of journalists.

8. Nielsen—To support its nearly 45,000 employees in 100 countries with real-time collaboration and cost-effective video conferencing, Nielsen turned to G Suite.

9. Ocado—This online-only supermarket uses Google Cloud’s AI capabilities to power its machine learning model for responding to customer requests and detecting fraud much faster.

10. PayPal—PayPal discusses the hows and whys of their journey to the public cloud.

11. Scotiabank—This Canadian banking institution shares its views on modernizing and using the cloud to solve inherent problems inside an organization.

12. Sky—The UK media company uses Google Cloud to identify and disconnect pirate streaming sites during live sporting events.

13. Target—Moving to Google Cloud has helped Target address challenges like scaling up for Cyber Monday without disruptions, and building new, cutting-edge experiences for their guests.

14. 20th Century Fox—The renowned movie studio shares how it’s using BigQuery ML to understand audience preferences.

15. Twitter—Twitter moved large-scale Hadoop clusters to GCP for ad hoc analysis and cold storage, with a total of about 300 PB of data migrated.

16. Veolia—This environmental solution provider moved its 250 systems to G Suite for their anytime, anywhere, any-device cloud project.

17. Weight Watchers—How Weight Watchers evolved its business, including creating mobile app and an online community to support its customers’ lifestyles.

Partners

1. 2017 Partner Awards—Congratulations to the winners! These awards recognize partners who dedicated themselves to creating industry-leading solutions and strong customer experiences with Google Cloud.

2. SAP and Deloitte collaboration—Customers can run SAP apps on GCP with Deloitte’s comprehensive tools.

3. Updates to our Cisco partnership—Includes integrations between our new Call Center AI solution and Cisco Customer Journey solutions, integrations with Webex and G Suite, and a new developer challenge for hybrid solutions.

4. Digital Asset and BlockApps—These launch partners are helping users try Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) frameworks on GCP, with open-source integrations coming later this year.

5. Intel and Appsbroker—We’ve created a cloud center of excellence to make high-performance cloud migration a lot easier.

6. NetApp—New capabilities help customers access shared file systems that apps need to move to cloud, plus Cloud Volumes are now available to more GCP customers.

7. VMware vRealize Orchestrator—A new plug-in makes it easy to use GCP alongside on-prem VMware deployments for efficient resource provisioning.

8. New partner specializations—We’ve recently welcomed 19 partners in five new specialization areas (bringing the total areas to nine) so customers can get even more industry-specific help moving to cloud.

9. SaaS-specific initiative—A new set of programs to help our partners bring SaaS applications to their customers.

10. Accenture Google Cloud Business Group, or AGBG—This newly formed group brings together experts who’ll work with enterprise clients to build tailored cloud solutions.

11. Partnership with NIH—We’re joining with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to make more research datasets available, integrate researcher authentication and authorization mechanisms with Google Cloud credentials, and support industry standards for data access, discovery, and cloud computation.

12. Partnership with Iron Mountain—This new partnership helps enterprises extract hard-to-find information from inside their stored documents.

Chrome, Devices and Mobility

1. Cloud-based browser management—From a single view, admins can manage Chrome Browser running on Windows, Mac, Chrome OS and Linux.

2. Password Alert Policy—Admins can set rules to prevent corporate password use on sites outside of the company’s control.

3. Managed Google Play (out of beta)—Admins can curate applications by user groups as well as customize a broad range of policies and functions like application blacklisting and remote uninstall.

Google Cloud Platform | AI and machine learning

1. Cloud AutoML Vision, AutoML Natural Language, and AutoML Translation (all three in beta)—Powerful ML models that can be extended to suit specific needs, without requiring any specialized knowledge in machine learning or coding.

2. Cloud Vision API (GA)—Cloud Vision API now recognizes handwriting, supports additional file types (PDF and TIFF), and can identify where an object is located within an image.

3. Cloud Text-to-Speech (beta)—Improvements to Cloud Text-to-Speech offer multilingual access to voices generated by DeepMind WaveNet technology and the ability to optimize for the type of speaker you plan to use.

4. Cloud Speech-to-Text—Updates to this API help you identify what language is being spoken, plus provide word-level confidence scores and multi-channel (multi-participant) recognition.

5. Training and online prediction through scikit-learn and XGBoost in Cloud ML Engine (GA) —While Cloud ML Engine has long supported TensorFlow, we’re releasing XGBoost and scikit-learn as alternative libraries for training and classification.

6. Kubeflow v0.2—Building on the previous version, Kubeflow v0.2 makes it easier for you to use machine learning software stacks on Kubernetes. Kubeflow v0.2 has an improved user interface and several enhancements to monitoring and reporting.

7. Cloud TPU v3 (alpha)—Announced at this year’s I/O, our third-generation TPUs are now available for Google Cloud customers to accelerate training and inference workloads.

8. Cloud TPU Pod (alpha)—Second-generation Cloud TPUs are now available to customers in scalable clusters. Support for Cloud TPUs in Kubernetes Engine is also available in beta.

9. Phone Gateway in Dialogflow Enterprise Edition (beta)—Now you can assign a working phone number to a virtual agent—all without infrastructure. Speech recognition, speech synthesis, natural language understanding and orchestration are all managed for you.

10. Knowledge Connectors in Dialogflow Enterprise Edition (beta)—These connectors understand unstructured documents like FAQs or knowledge base articles and complement your pre-built intents with automated responses sourced from internal document collections.

11. Automatic Spelling Correction in Dialogflow Enterprise Edition (beta)—Natural language understanding can sometimes be challenged by spelling and grammar errors in a text-based conversation. Dialogflow can now automatically correct spelling mistakes using technology similar to what’s used in Google Search and other products.

12. Sentiment Analysis in Dialogflow Enterprise Edition (beta)—Relies on the Cloud Natural Language API to optionally inspect a request and score a user's attitude as positive, negative or neutral.

13. Text-to-Speech in Dialogflow Enterprise Edition (beta)—We’re adding native audio response to Dialogflow to complement existing Speech-to-Text capability.

14. Contact Center AI (alpha)—A new solution which includes new Dialogflow features alongside other tools to perform analytics and assist live agents.

15. Agent Assist in Contact Center AI (alpha)—Supports a live agent during a conversation and provides the agent with relevant information, like suggested articles, in real-time.

16. Conversational Topic Modeler in Contact Center AI (alpha)—Uses Google AI to analyze historical audio and chat logs to uncover insights about topics and trends in customer interactions.

Google Cloud Platform | Infrastructure services

1. Managed Istio (alpha)—A fully-managed service on GCP for Istio, an open-source project that creates a service mesh to manage and control microservices.

2. Istio 1.0—Speaking of open-source Istio, the project is imminently moving up to version 1.0.

3. Apigee API Management for Istio (GA)—Soon you can use your existing Apigee Edge API management platform to wrangle microservices running on the Istio service mesh.

4. Stackdriver Service Monitoring (early access)—A new view for our Stackdriver monitoring suite that shows operators how their end users are experiencing their systems. This way, they can manage against SRE-inspired SLOs.

5. GKE On-Prem with multi-cluster management (coming soon to alpha)—A Google-configured version of Kubernetes that includes multi-cluster management and can be deployed on-premise or in other clouds, laying the foundation for true hybrid computing.

6. GKE Policy Management (coming soon to alpha)—Lets you take control of your Kubernetes environment by applying centralized policies across all enrolled clusters.

7. Resource-based pricing for Compute Engine (rolling out this fall)—A new way we’re calculating sustained use discounts on Compute Engine machines, aggregating all your vCPUs and memory resources to maximize your savings.

Google Cloud Platform | Application development

1. GKE serverless add-on (coming soon to alpha)—Runs serverless workloads that scale up and down automatically, or respond to events, on top of Kubernetes Engine.

2. Knative—The same technologies included in the GKE serverless add-on are now available in this open-source project.

3. Cloud Build (GA)—Our fully managed continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform lets you build container and non-container artifacts and integrates with a wide variety of tools from across the developer ecosystem.

4. GitHub partnership—GitHub is a popular source code repository, and now you can use it with Cloud Build.

5. New App Engine runtimes—We’re adding support for the popular Python 3.7 and PHP 7.2 runtimes to App Engine standard environment.

6. Cloud Functions (GA)—Our event-driven serverless compute service is now generally available, and includes support for additional languages, plus performance, networking and security features.

7. Serverless containers on Cloud Functions (early preview)—Packages a function within a container, to better support custom runtimes, binaries and frameworks.  

Google Cloud Platform | Data analytics

1. BigQuery ML (beta)—A new capability that allows data analysts and data scientists to easily build machine learning models directly from BigQuery with simple SQL commands, making machine learning more accessible to all.

2. BigQuery Clustering (beta)—Creates clustered tables in BigQuery as an added layer of data optimization to accelerate query performance.

3. BigQuery GIS (public alpha)—New functions and data types in BigQuery that follow the SQL/MM Spatial standard. Handy for PostGIS users and anyone already doing geospatial analysis in SQL.

4. Sheets Data Connector for BigQuery (beta)—A new way to directly access and refresh data in BigQuery from Google Sheets.

5. Data Studio Explorer (beta)—Deeper integration between BigQuery and Google Data Studio to help users visualize query results quickly.

6. Cloud Composer (GA)—Based on the open source Apache Airflow project, Cloud Composer distributes workloads across multiple clouds.

7. Customer Managed Encryption Keys for Dataproc—Customer-managed encryption keys that let customers create, use and revoke key encryption for BigQuery, Compute Engine and Cloud Storage. Generally available for BigQuery; beta for Compute Engine and Cloud Storage.

8. Streaming analytics updates, including Python Streaming and Dataflow Streaming Engine (both in beta)—Provides streaming customers more responsive autoscaling on fewer resources, by separating compute and state storage.

9. Dataproc Autoscaling and Dataproc Custom Packages (alpha)—Gives users Hadoop and Spark clusters that scale automatically based on the resource requirements of submitted jobs, delivering a serverless experience.

Google Cloud Platform | Databases

1. Oracle workloads on GCP—We’re partnering with managed service providers (MSPs) so you can run Oracle workloads on GCP using dedicated hardware.

2. Compute Engine VMs powered by Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory—Lets you run SAP HANA workloads for more capacity at lower cost.

3. Cloud Firestore (beta)—Helps you store, sync and query data for cloud-native apps. Support for Datastore Mode is also coming soon.

4. Updates to Cloud Bigtable—Regional replication across zones and Key Visualizer, in beta, to help debug performance issues.

5. Updates to Cloud Spanner—Lets users import and export data using Cloud Dataflow. A preview of Cloud Spanner’s data manipulation language (DML) is now available.

6. Resource-based pricing model for Compute Engine—A new billing model gives customers more savings and a simpler bill.

Google Cloud Platform | IoT

1. Edge TPU (early access)—Google’s purpose-built ASIC chip that’s designed to run TensorFlow Lite ML so you can accelerate ML training in the cloud and utilize fast ML inference at the edge.

2. Cloud IoT Edge (alpha)—Extends data processing and machine learning capabilities to gateways, cameras and end devices, helping make IoT devices and deployments smart, secure and reliable.

Google Cloud Platform | Security

1. Context-aware access—Capabilities to help organizations define and enforce granular access to GCP APIs, resources, G Suite, and third-party SaaS apps based on a user’s identity, location and the context of their request.

2. Titan Security Key—A FIDO security key that includes firmware developed by Google to verify its integrity.

3. Shielded VMs (beta)—A new way to leverage advanced platform security capabilities to help ensure your VMs haven’t been tampered with or compromised.

4. Binary Authorization (alpha)—Lets you enforce signature validation when deploying container images.

5. Container Registry Vulnerability Scanning (alpha)—Automatically performs vulnerability scanning for Ubuntu, Debian and Alpine images to help ensure they are safe to deploy and don’t contain vulnerable packages.

6. Geo-based access control in Cloud Armor (beta)—Lets you control access to your services based on the geographic location of the client trying to connect to your application.

7. Cloud HSM (alpha)—A fully managed cloud-hosted hardware security module (HSM) service that allows you to host encryption keys and perform cryptographic operations in FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified HSMs.  

8. Access Transparency (coming soon to GA)—Provides an audit trail of actions taken by Google Support and Engineering in the rare instances that they interact with your data and system configurations on Google Cloud.

G Suite | Enterprise collaboration and productivity

1. New investigation tool in the Security Center (Early Adopter Program)—A new tool in the security center for G Suite that helps admins identify which users are potentially infected, see if anything’s been shared externally and remove access to Drive files or delete malicious emails.

2. Data Regions for G Suite (available now for G Suite Business and Enterprise customers)—Lets you choose where to store primary data for select G Suite apps—globally, distributed, U.S. or Europe.

3. Smart Reply in Hangouts Chat—Coming soon to G Suite, Smart Reply uses artificial intelligence to recognize which emails need responses and proposes reply options.

4. Smart Compose in Gmail—Coming soon to G Suite, Smart Compose intelligently autocompletes emails for you by filling in greetings, common phrases and more.

5. Grammar Suggestions in Google Docs (Early Adopter Program)—Uses a unique machine translation-based approach to recognize grammatical errors (simple and complex) and suggest corrections.

6. Voice Commands for Hangouts Meet hardware (coming to select Hangouts Meet hardware customers later this year)—Brings some of the same magic of the Google Assistant to the conference room so that teams can connect to video meetings quickly.

7. The new Gmail (GA)—Features like redesigned security warnings, snooze and offline access are now generally available to G Suite users.

8. New functionality in Cloud Search—Helps organizations intelligently and securely index third-party data beyond G Suite (whether the data is stored in the cloud or on-prem).

9. Google Voice to G Suite (Early Adopter Program)—An enterprise version of Google Voice that lets admins manage users, provision and port phone numbers, access detailed reports and more.

10. Standalone offering of Drive Enterprise (GA)—New offering with usage-based pricing to help companies easily transition data from legacy enterprise content management (ECM) systems.

11. G Suite Enterprise for Education—Expanding to 16 new countries.

12. Jamboard Mobile App—Added features for Jamboard mobile devices, including new drawing tools and a new way to claim jams using near-field communication (NFC).

13. Salesforce Add-on in Google Sheets—A new add-on that lets you import data and reports from Salesforce into Sheets and then push updates made in Sheets back to Salesforce.

Social Impact

1. Data Solutions for Change—A program that empowers nonprofits with advanced data analytics to drive social and environmental impact. Benefits include role-based support and Qwiklabs.

2. Visualize 2030—In collaboration with the World Bank, the United Nations Foundation, and the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, we’re hosting a data storytelling contest for college or graduate students.

3. Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator—We’re helping Harambee connect more unemployed youth with entry-level positions in Johannesburg by analyzing large datasets with BigQuery and machine learning on Cloud Dataflow.

4. Foundation for Precision Medicine—We’re aiding the Foundation for Precision Medicine to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease by scaling their patient database to millions of anonymized electronic medical record (EMR) data points, creating custom modeling, and helping them visualize data.

Whew! That was 104. Thanks to all our customers, partners, and Googlers for making this our best week of the year.

But wait, there’s more! Here’s the 105th announcement: Next 2019 will be April 9-11 at the newly renovated Moscone in San Francisco. Please save the date!  

by via The Keyword

Set your summer schedule with events in Search

We’re bringing VR Creator Lab to Europe

The first Smart Displays with the Google Assistant are now available in stores

Google for Entrepreneurs impact in Europe: our annual report

New ads.txt-only inventory control in Display & Video 360

Google for Nigeria: Making the internet more useful for more people

New brand, new home: Where to find Google Marketing Platform online

When we brought together DoubleClick and the Google Analytics 360 Suite under Google Marketing Platform, we knew we had to make some changes to our websites, blogs and social media channels too. Now, the resources you’ve been reading and visiting over the years have been updated to reflect our new brand, so you can find the latest news, tips and more on our advertising and analytics solutions in one spot.

First, you should know that we’ve moved our content and product information to marketingplatform.google.com. You’ll also find product sign-in links there. (Those bookmarks you have for the old DoubleClick and Google Analytics websites should automatically redirect you.)

We’ve also launched new and improved blogs, with information for our product users and enterprise customers. We’ll be regularly updating them with product news and digital marketing insights. Bookmark us.

Of course, you can also connect with Google Marketing Platform on social:

• Twitter: Follow @GMktgPlatform

• LinkedIn: Follow Google Marketing Platform for updates

• YouTube: Subscribe for new videos

You’ll find customer stories, major product announcements, research, reports and other advertising and analytics content intended for large enterprises.

And don’t worry: We haven’t changed the Google Analytics social channels. We will continue to bring you product news and tips on Google+, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook.

We hope you like our new home. Thanks for visiting, and come back soon!

by via The Keyword

What’s happening next for G Suite Enterprise for Education

Data Solutions for Change: empowering nonprofits through large-scale analytics

Helping enterprises stay competitive with new updates in G Suite

Building on our cloud security leadership to help keep businesses protected

Moving to the cloud requires careful planning and hard work, but it also requires something more fundamental: trust. You need to trust that your cloud provider will keep your data safe and prevent threats, and also do it in a way that is transparent and keeps you in control. As threats increase in complexity, trust requires a cloud provider that is always working to create new ways to protect you by being on the forefront of security innovation.

In March we announced more than 20 security enhancements to help keep your organization protected. It's been four short months since then, but in that time we’ve increased the quantity and scope of our security offerings. Here’s an update on our ongoing work, and what it can mean for you.

What we’re announcing today:

• Context-aware access capabilities, available now for select customers in beta for VPC Service Controls, and coming soon to beta for Cloud IAM, Cloud IAP and Cloud Identity

• Titan Security Key, available now to Cloud customers, and coming soon to the Google Store

• Shielded VMs, available now in beta

• Binary Authorization, coming soon to beta

• Container Registry Vulnerability Scanning, coming soon to beta

• Cloud Armor geo-based access control, available now in beta

• Cloud HSM, coming soon to beta

• Access Transparency, soon to be generally available

• G Suite security center investigation tool, available now via Early Adopter Program

• G Suite data regions, now generally available

Making access to apps and services more secure and convenient

People increasingly want access to their business critical apps on the devices that make the most sense for how they work. However, traditional access management solutions often put security at odds with flexibility by imposing one-size-fits-all, coarse-grained controls that limit users.

To address this, we’re announcing context-aware access, an innovative approach to access management that implements many elements of Google’s BeyondCorp vision for apps and services on Google Cloud and beyond, to help organizations increase security as well as flexibility. Context-aware access allows organizations to define and enforce granular access to GCP APIs, resources, G Suite, and third-party SaaS apps based on a user’s identity, location, and the context of their request. This increases your security posture while decreasing complexity for your users, giving them the ability to seamlessly log on to apps from anywhere and any device. Context-aware access capabilities are available for select customers using VPC Service Controls, and are coming soon for customers using Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM), Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP), and Cloud Identity.

We’re also announcing Titan Security Key, a FIDO security key that includes firmware developed by Google to verify its integrity. We’ve long advocated the use of security keys as the strongest, most phishing-resistant authentication factor for high-value users, especially cloud admins, to protect against the potentially damaging consequences of credential theft. Titan Security Key gives you even more peace of mind that your accounts are protected, with assurance from Google of the integrity of the physical key. Titan Security Keys are available now to Google Cloud customers and will be available for anyone to purchase on the Google Store soon.

Strengthening a secure foundation

As your organization moves workloads to the cloud, trust in the underlying infrastructure is critically important. Our goal is to deliver a highly reliable, highly secure foundation for you to build on, and to allow you to take advantage of the protections we’ve built in.

Available now in beta, Shielded VMs leverage advanced platform security capabilities to help ensure your VMs have not been tampered with. With Shielded VMs, you can monitor and react to any changes in the VM baseline as well as its current runtime state. You can learn more about how to easily deploy Shielded VMs on our website.

In addition to verifying the integrity of VMs, organizations running containerized workloads need to ensure only trusted containers are deployed on Google Kubernetes Engine, as part of a secure software supply chain. With Binary Authorization, coming soon to beta, you can enforce signature validation when deploying container images. Binary Authorization can be integrated with existing CI/CD pipelines to ensure images are properly built and tested prior to deployment. It can also be combined with Container Registry Vulnerability Scanning to prevent deploying images that contain any vulnerable packages. Container Registry Vulnerability Scanning automatically performs vulnerability scanning for Ubuntu, Debian and Alpine images to ensure your images are safe to deploy. Learn more about Container Registry Vulnerability Scanning and Binary Authorization on our website.

Google Cloud’s extensive global network offers organizations meaningful performance and security advantages. Cloud Armor isour DDoS and application defense service, based on the same global infrastructure that we use to protect Search, Gmail and YouTube. Today we’re announcing geo-based access control for Cloud Armor, available now in beta,  which allows you to control access to your services based on the geographic location of the client trying to connect to your application. Other Cloud Armor capabilities include whitelisting or blocking traffic based on IP addresses, deploying pre-built rules for SQL injection and cross-site scripting, and controlling traffic based on Layer 3-Layer 7 parameters of your choice. Cloud Armor works in conjunction with our global load balancing service and provides a policy framework with a rich,open rules language for specifying defense rules. In effect, you can deploy application-level DDoS defense at scale based on your unique requirements.

Securing the bits

Data protection is the number one consideration when running enterprise workloads in the cloud, and we’re proud to be the only cloud provider that encrypts data at rest, by default, with no customer intervention required. But we know that many customers may still want additional options that help them protect their most sensitive information assets.

Today we’re introducing Cloud HSM, a managed cloud-hosted hardware security module (HSM) service. Cloud HSM, coming soon in beta, allows you to host encryption keys and perform cryptographic operations in FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified HSMs. With this fully managed service, you can protect your most sensitive workloads without needing to worry about the operational overhead of managing an HSM cluster. The Cloud HSM service is tightly integrated with Cloud Key Management Service (KMS), which makes it extremely simple to create and use keys that are generated and protected in hardware and use it with customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) integrated services such as BigQuery, Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage and DataProc. Learn more on the Cloud HSM webpage.

For even stronger levels of protection, we recently introduced Asylo, our open source framework built to help protect the confidentiality and integrity of applications and data in a confidential computing environment. We’re pleased that it continues to gain developer interest and momentum. Learn more on the Asylo website.

Giving you more transparency, insight and control

We believe that trust is created through transparency, and want to empower you with the visibility, insight and control you need to meet your organization’s security objectives as you move to the cloud or increase your cloud adoption.

We provide a comprehensive level of documentation on how we do things in our cloud, such as data encryption. We also offer customers near real-time visibility into the limited situations when we’re required to interact with your data on our platform. Access Transparency for GCP—a first-of-its-kind capability—is soon to be generally available. Learn more about Access Transparency on our website.

For G Suite customers, we’re adding new functionality (sign up for early adopter) for security center—the investigation tool. With this new tool, admins can identify security issues within their domain and take rapid action to remediate. As an example, admins can conduct organization-wide searches across multiple data sources to see which files are being shared externally. They can pivot across these searches to correlate results, and perform bulk actions on limiting files access. We’re also making it easier to move G Suite reporting and audit data from the Admin console to Google BigQuery. And for GCP customers, Cloud Security Command Center recently added integrations with five new container security partner tools to help you gain more insight into risks for containers you’re running on Google Kubernetes Engine.

Finally, many customers take advantage of our globally distributed data centers to minimize latency and increase geo-redundancy. Some organizations, however, have requirements around where their data is stored, and we’re committed to meeting their needs. As a first step towards that commitment,data regions for G Suite makes it possible for G Suite Business and Enterprise customers to designate the region in which primary data for select G Suite apps is stored when at rest—globally, in the U.S., or in Europe.

In addition to these updates, last week we announced a new policy for Chrome Browser, called Password Alert, which lets IT admins prevent their employees from reusing their corporate password on sites outside of the company’s control, helping guard against account compromise.

More to come

Recognizing our ongoing security efforts, Google Cloud was recently named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Platform Native Security, Q2 2018 report. We’re thrilled to receive this recognition, but at the same time, we aren’t standing still. We believe a more secure business landscape is better for everyone, and we’ll continue to deliver innovative ways to help enterprises be more secure. To learn more, visit our security page.

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Bringing intelligence to the edge with Cloud IoT

Working with Accenture to help enterprises move to the cloud

Cloud adoption is only growing in the enterprise, and for many businesses moving to the cloud, a little help is never a bad thing. Enterprises have told us they’d benefit from working with partners with deep cloud expertise to build migration strategies specialized to their industry or business case.

With this in mind, today we’re announcing a collaboration with Accenture to form the Accenture Google Cloud Business Group, or AGBG. The AGBG will include cloud experts from both Accenture and Google Cloud who will work with enterprise clients to help build cloud solutions tailored to their specific industries and needs. We’ll start with a focus on retail, consumer packaged goods (CPG) and healthcare, with a goal to expand to more industries in the future.

The AGBG can help companies:

• Build next generation business processes with artificial intelligence and machine learning based approaches to create new value across the enterprise.

• Modernize enterprise infrastructure by migrating their workloads to the cloud and provide managed services tailored for Google Cloud Platform.

• Bring global scale to clients that run SAP by delivering managed SAP solutions on Google Cloud Platform.

• Create relevant customer experiences by combining Google Marketing Platform data with other enterprise data sources, helping to find deeper insights and increasing customer engagement.

• Scale G Suite across the enterprise, reimagining work with the cloud-native productivity service that is secure, smart, and simple.

We first announced our strategic alliance with Accenture in 2016. Since then, we’ve collaborated on  a number of solutions for industry-specific verticals. This week, Accenture was also named our 2017 Google Cloud Platform Partner of the Year. They have more than a thousand practitioners trained on Google Cloud technologies in their roster, as well as a strong track record for helping companies add value by moving critical services and data to the cloud.

Learn more about how the AGBG can help you.

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Four businesses, four inspiring missions: see them in action

What happened at Google Cloud Next ‘18: Day 1

What a way to kick off Next ‘18. We started by welcoming our community of leaders, developers, and entrepreneurs to Moscone Center in San Francisco. As Diane mentioned in her keynote, it was Google’s biggest event ever, with more than 25,000 registrants. We learned how the cloud is reimagining work, rethinking the contact center, and redefining what’s possible for many of our customers. (Plus, there was a surprise visit from Sundar.) Read on for the highlights.

Better building in the cloud

Cloud computing is so much more than outsourced infrastructure—it promises agility, reliability and scale. We want to deliver on that promise, so today, we announced Cloud Services Platform, a set of foundational services and technologies that deliver advanced operational and management capabilities to your IT environment, in the cloud and on-premise. Read more in our Cloud Services Platform and serverless announcements.

What we announced

• We’re introducing a service mesh based on the open-source Istio, which will soon move to version 1.0, and Managed Istio, a fully managed version thereof, running in GCP. Also, Apigee API Management for Istio lets enterprises operationalize microservices created by the Istio service mesh with their existing API management tools.

• For Istio and App Engine workloads, the new Stackdriver Service Monitoring provides an SRE-inspired, service-oriented view of your workloads, showing you how your end users experience your systems.

• We’re furthering hybrid computing with GKE On-Prem, a Google-configured version of Kubernetes that includes multi-cluster management, that you can deploy on-premise or in other clouds.

• GKE Policy Management establishes a single source of truth for the policies that govern your Kubernetes workloads, across any enrolled cluster.

• We want you to build all your applications serverlessly, even if you use Kubernetes. To help you do that, we will offer the new GKE serverless add-on. Then, we’re releasing that same serverless framework as open-source under the name Knative.

• Speaking of serverless, we’re adding support for PHP 3.7 and Python 7.2 runtimes on App Engine standard environment.

• Cloud Functions is now generally available, with support for additional languages, plus performance, networking and security features.

• Serverless containers on Cloud Functions allow you to run container-based workloads in a fully managed environment and still only pay for what you use.

• Cloud Firestore lets you store and sync your app data at global scale, with access within the GCP Console coming soon.

• Finally, Cloud Build is our new continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) service that’s integrated with popular developer tools and that lets you build serverless applications.

AI for every business

Empowering businesses and developers to do more with AI means providing them with tools that make it possible to take advantage of machine learning, regardless of skill level or expertise. Read more in our AI and Contact Center blog posts.

What we announced

• Cloud AutoML Vision, Natural Language, and Translation extend powerful ML models to suit specific needs, without requiring any specialized knowledge in machine learning or coding.

• TPU V3s, our custom ASIC chips designed for machine learning workloads, are in alpha.

• New enhancements to Dialogflow Enterprise Edition enable you to design smarter and more conversational interfaces.

• A new solution, Contact Center AI, which includes new Dialogflow features alongside other tools to assist live agents and perform analytics.

Reimagining how we work

In order to stay competitive, companies are reimagining how their global teams work together using cloud-native collaboration in G Suite that’s smart, simple and secure. Proactively protect against security threats, manage where company data is stored and shared and communicate more effectively with these new, assistive capabilities in G Suite. Read more in this post from G Suite.

What we announced

• A new investigation tool in the Security Center helps admins identify which users are potentially infected, see if anything’s been shared externally and remove access to Drive files or delete malicious emails.

• Customers can choose where to store primary data for select G Suite apps—globally, distributed, U.S. or Europe—with Data Regions for G Suite.

• Smart Reply is coming to Hangouts Chat. Using AI, Smart Reply recognizes which messages need responses and proposes reply options that are casual enough for chat, yet appropriate for the workplace.

• Smart Compose in Gmail intelligently autocompletes emails for you—by filling in greetings, common phrases and more–so you collaborate more efficiently. Smart Compose will be available to G Suite customers in the coming weeks.

• Grammar Suggestions in Google Docs uses a unique machine translation-based approach to recognize grammatical errors (simple and complex) and suggest corrections. It is available in an Early Adopter Program (“beta”) for G Suite customers today.

• Voice Commands for Hangouts Meet hardware brings some of the same magic of the Google Assistant to the conference room so that teams can connect to video meetings quickly. Voice Commands will roll out to select Meet hardware customers later this year.

What our customers are saying

At Next ‘18 we’re joined by more than 290 customer speakers. Here are a few of our favorite quotes from day one:

“My guys love working with your team. We’ve learned a lot from Google about site reliability engineering. But more than that, I think it’s the commitment to open source—that made all the difference. At the end of the day, it wasn’t me who chose Google, it was my engineers. Google was important to the engineering team, so it mattered to me.” —Mike McNamara, Executive VP, Chief Information and Digital Officer, Target

“[Visiting your midwest data center] made us realize Google was operating at a totally different scale. I also came to appreciate how much security was involved at every single point. Security to get into the complex. Security for each server. And security for destroying drives that were no longer being used.” —Bernd Leukert, Member of the Executive Board, Products & Innovation, SAP SE

"We have 95 years of innovation. As the world and consumers change, we have to change too. My job is to make sure over 40,000 associates in over 100 countries have the most robust tools to innovate and service our clients… [we needed] a collaboration platform that allows our employees to connect anytime, anywhere on any device. That led us to G Suite." —Kim Anstett, Chief Information Officer, Nielsen

“Standardizing monitoring signals lets us monitor across our systems, correlate logs, and do distributed tracing. But these monitoring concepts requires services to communicate in a standard way. With Istio…We have a uniform and transparent mechanism to collect metrics and logs…and are running it in production.” —Jeff White, Software Engineer, eBay

We’ll be updating this post all week as it happens at Next ‘18. Check back here tomorrow for the latest news from the event.

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How one Googler brings local love to work every day

Here’s to five years of Chromecast

A milestone for Chrome security: marking HTTP as “not secure”

Work reimagined: new ways to collaborate safer, smarter and simpler with G Suite

Sky’s the limit: How businesses across every industry are taking advantage of Google Cloud

From bringing the latest Mario game to millions of worldwide players to transforming public health in Chile, our customers do extraordinary things with Google Cloud—and we’re constantly inspired by their work. Today at Next, we’re welcoming more than 290 customer speakers to share what they’ve learned launching businesses, reimagining work, and disrupting industries with Google Cloud. Here’s a look at how just a few of our customers are taking advantage of the cloud.

Helping financial services firms create broad offerings for customers

Facing growing competition from fintech disruptors, financial services organizations are increasingly turning to the cloud to modernize their systems, explore new business models, and improve customer experiences while working to comply with the regulatory shifts happening in the industry.

Financial services leaders like Allianz, Banco Itau, BBVA, BNP Paribas Fortis, Credit Karma, HSBC and PayPal are already using our cloud technology. For example, HSBC recently shared how they’re adopting a cloud-first strategy to build a more reliable and resilient service so they can innovate faster. And PayPal, which initially moved workloads to the cloud to take advantage of efficiencies like the ability to scale up or down as needed without wasting resources, is now looking at ways to build machine learning capabilities around their data.

Prescribing medical advances with the cloud

In the healthcare industry, patients expect their doctors to have visibility into their entire medical history, but many healthcare organizations haven’t found a way to easily, securely and instantaneously collaborate while caring for patients. By using the cloud to speed up data access and sharing, they can create better patient experiences and even accelerate research.

Change Healthcare, a leading provider of enterprise imaging solutions, is using GCP to provide a more scalable and cost-effective data infrastructure, and using G Suite to develop new collaborative solutions for imaging specialists. Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine is using Google Genomics and BigQuery to analyze hundreds of entire genomes in days and return query results in seconds while providing reliable security for DNA data. And there are many other forward-looking research and healthcare organizations, including Broad Institute, Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine, National Institute on Aging and Roche, that are using Google Cloud to change what’s possible in healthcare through technology.  

Helping media and entertainment companies leap forward  

While we’ve seen a rise in consolidation across all vertical markets, perhaps no industry has been more affected than media and entertainment. Traditional media players like newspapers are consolidating to build scalability, expand digital offerings and provide tailored customer experiences.

To navigate this massive transition, companies including Discovery Communications, Hearst, Nielsen, and New York Times use Google Cloud as they prepare for—and build—the future of the industry. For example, Hearst Newspapers—the newspaper division of one of the world’s largest mass media publishers—uses Cloud Natural Language API for content classification, improving the speed and accuracy of publishing content and gauging readership while reducing manual labor. This precision and speed are critical to engaging readers with the right editorial and advertising content on digital properties. Newer media companies like Spotify, Shazam and Vimeo use Google Cloud to scale quickly to meet customer demand and speed up video streaming while reducing costs.

Gaming is also at the forefront of cloud adoption and innovation. With Google Cloud, gaming companies including Bandai Namco, Nintendo (partnering with app developer DeNA) and Unity are finding new benefits, from building and launching games to growing their global player base.  

Creating seamless experiences for shoppers

Retail customers want individualized experiences, whether they are shopping on their couch, on their phone, or in a store. To keep up with these ever-evolving demands, retailers like Bed Bath & Beyond, Carrefour, Etsy, Kroger, Lush, Shopify and zulily are using GCP to solve their particular challenges around serving modern customers.

For example, Urban Outfitters is using AutoML to improve image recognition and search on the clothing company’s mobile apps, reducing the time to train machine learning models from one week to a few hours. App users, in turn, get more tailored recommendations and better search results.

Ocado, the British online-only supermarket, is using our AI capabilities to implement a machine learning model for responding to customer requests and detecting fraud. The team is now able to respond to urgent messages four times faster. They also discovered using AI that 7 percent of its emails don’t require a response at all, which means call center representatives now have more time to devote to higher priority messages.  

Removing the turbulence from the travel and transportation industries

Accustomed to ordering a Lyft with a swipe of the thumb or booking a vacation with the click of a mouse, customers have sky-high expectations for travel and transportation. Yet many transportation companies struggle to provide customers with the experiences they’ve come to expect from online-first industry newcomers. That’s why companies like AirAsia, Airbus and LATAM Airlines—in addition to Lyft—are taking flight with Google Cloud. Airbus, for instance, recently expanded its relationship with Google Cloud and chose G Suite for faster and simpler employee collaboration. 

Helping energy companies use the power of data

Google Cloud enables energy companies to process huge amounts of data and gain insights through data analytics and machine learning. Our collaborations with energy providers such as Total—with whom we are jointly developing AI solutions for subsurface data analysis for oil and gas exploration and production—will help to transform the industry. Total is joining other companies like Cognite, Repsol and Schlumberger that are also working with Google Cloud to supercharge their businesses.

We’re looking forward to helping many more of you build the cloud infrastructure that will power your business, and hope all of the amazing customer stories at Next will inspire you. In the meantime, check out some of the other ways that organizations across industries are using Google Cloud.

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Live from Google Cloud Next: Advancing every business in the Cloud

Hello to everyone from Google Cloud Next ‘18. Today we’re joined by more than 20,000 people here in San Francisco—the biggest Google event ever. I’m excited for what the next three days have in store.

Information is powering much of our economy, and the scope of technology has evolved to encompass all of business and all of society. IT departments used to be a cost center. Now, they're a key driver of business. Companies are re-engineering how they do business as part of their journey to the cloud. IT is being used to advance every field. We are seeing such amazing growth, and yet we are clearly in the beginning stage.

So, as companies move everything to the cloud, why are they choosing Google?

Google is what I would call a modern enterprise company. Google’s business is information, and thus Google Cloud was built to efficiently take in information, organize it, and give back intelligence. This is what every company needs in order to drive their business—supercharged information.

A strong foundation in the cloud

People generally acknowledge that Google has an incredibly advanced cloud; it is pretty amazing. It includes many football stadium-sized data centers, all running carbon neutral; hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber-optic submarine cables; hyper-fast machine-to-machine interconnects; specialized processors like Titan and TPU; Spanner, a relational database that provides global transaction consistency; and big data tools like BigQuery that can process an entire petabyte in 3.7 minutes.

Throughout Next ‘18, we will be going deep on AI and security, areas that Google invests in heavily. Why? Because security is the number one worry, and AI is the number one opportunity.

Security is built into every layer of our operation. We announced 20 new security advancements in March and will be announcing another 10 new security products and services this week. This year, we were proud that Forrester recognized us as a leader in public cloud platform native security.

For productivity apps, one of the most secure ways to set up your organization is to combine a Chromebook, G Suite and two factor authentication hardware in the Chromebook USB port. Companies are catching on. Chromebooks for enterprise sales were up more than 175% last year and G Suite adoption is also accelerating. G Suite’s Gmail is able to stop 99.9% of spam and phishing attacks. In addition to being secure, G Suite is so powerful for improving and transforming how we work.  

AI is our biggest collective opportunity

Early on, Google’s founders had the vision that AI was going to be important. Today, AI is built into everything we do at Google. From our data center energy usage to BigQuery to Gmail, AI is applied throughout our business. Now we are working to make it easy for you to incorporate the power of AI into what you do. In the last year we introduced automated machine learning model generation, AutoML, and we are announcing new versions today.

Throughout our conference we will be talking about open source, where Google is a leader with more than 2,000 open source projects, including TensorFlow and Kubernetes. We have been running the underlying technology and concepts that make up Kubernetes inside Google for over a decade. By the time we introduced it in Google Cloud, it had more than 20,000 contributors and is approaching one million comments and pull requests, making it one of the fastest moving projects in the history of open source.

Two years ago, at a much smaller Next event, we had a meeting with industry analysts who told us it would probably take us 10 years to become enterprise ready. We listened and we got on it. We called it our table stakes effort. Fast forward two years and a lot of hard work and we were recently named a leader multiple Gartner’s Magic Quadrants, hopefully more are coming.

Building a better cloud for our customers

Cloud is an extremely complex business and enterprise-readiness includes excellence at helping customers—from startups and digital natives to global leaders. Over the course of Next, we have over 290 customer speakers, from every size and industry imaginable, to share what they’ve learned on their journey to the cloud.

In health, we saw the opportunity to bring Google’s healthcare machine learning to market.

We are working with the Broad Institute on genome processing tools and we are developing an API for making healthcare records interoperable, as well as a way to anonymize records. Some of our customers in this sector include Cardinal Health, Lahey Health, Cleveland Clinic and Fitbit.

Today, we are announcing a partnership with the National Institutes of Health to make it easier to access and analyze large biomedical data sets, which we believe will accelerate efforts to find treatments and cures for disease. Healthcare is just one of many industries that can benefit from Google’s innovation in the cloud.

Part of our success has to do with our engineer-to-engineer engagement model. In the last year alone, we’ve tripled the number of engineers who work with customers, including in our customer engineering team and our professional services organization. By design, we have more customer engineers than sales reps.

We’ve built our Office of the CTO so that early in your cloud journey, you have access to super experienced and knowledgeable technologists. This group has been in demand, so we’ve grown the team 10X over the last year. Perhaps our most immersive customer engagement offering is our Advanced Solutions Lab. There, customers work side-by-side with Google engineers, learning how to apply machine learning to solve their biggest business challenges.  

Working together with our partners

Partners are key to us and to our customers. We have strategic integration and go-to-market partners, channel partners, and system integrators. On the strategic side, the SAP partnership we announced last year at Next has made great progress. This year, we partnered with Cisco on a hybrid cloud and on-prem version of Kubernetes that will ship soon. And last fall we announced that we can integrate a customer’s Salesforce CRM data, their Google Ads data, and any other data source, all in BigQuery. System integrators including Accenture and Deloitte are building out practices specifically for Google Cloud, as are many other SIs.

Our channel is now over 12,000 strong and we are increasing our enablement programs. They help us extend our reach, and when these partners work with customers, we offer to support the work with one of our professional services engineers.

Another important area is training and communities—training for customers, partners, and our own team. We’ve tripled our training and enablement headcount. Our customers are taking more than 100 times as many GCP courses via Qwiklabs than a year ago, on topics like machine learning, big data, and Kubernetes.

Looking Ahead

I have spent a lot of enjoyable time this last year meeting with companies, both large and small, discussing what might be possible with Google Cloud. Many of the engagements have been astonishing, particularly with companies where IT was not historically a key driver of their growth.

An engagement will start out as an effort to save costs on infrastructure; at first it is often very competitive amongst the three clouds. Then, as we start to brainstorm around where the business wants to go, we start talking about what our technology could make possible, and that changes the discussion. Many times now, our customer pauses, and they end up rethinking their entire product strategy, even their vision of the future. When we resume, there is a much more ambitious plan. It has been great to be a part of that process of true digital transformation, and it makes all of us in Google Cloud proud to engage in these opportunities.

For the smaller companies and startups we work with, it’s sometimes a different story. Their ambitions are big, and robust cloud services will help them get there. But at our core, we’re a developer-led company, and developers are constantly top of mind for us as we grow and expand Google Cloud. We never stop thinking about what they need, and what tools will make them better, more focused, and more productive.

The theme of our conference is Made Here Together. On behalf of all of us at Google, we are excited to be at Next with our customers and partners who are building together with us.

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Building a global biomedical data ecosystem with the National Institutes of Health

Biomedical research faces enormous challenges as the volume of genomic, transcriptomic, metabolomic, phenotypic, and other data generated in research labs across the world continues to grow. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the total amount of sequence data alone isdoubling every seven months.

Although analyzing this staggering amount of data presents the potential for enormous positive impact, sharing data among researchers has historically been frustratingly difficult. Data is difficult to aggregate, even virtually, due to its size and to privacy concerns. Patient consents can be irregular or not machine-readable. Researcher identity often has to be established in order to access datasets. And datasets are not always housed in an environment rich in compute resources. Cloud computing can overcome all these challenges by providing scalable storage, elastic computing resources, fast global networks, and tools for data preparation and analysis.

Today we’re announcing that we are joining the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a partner on the STRIDES (Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability) Initiative to bring the power of Google Cloud to biomedical research. As part of this agreement, we’ll make some of the most important NIH-funded datasets available to users with appropriate privacy controls. To simplify access to these datasets, we’ll integrate researcher authentication and authorization mechanisms with Google Cloud credentials. And we’re working with theGlobal Alliance for Genomics & Health and theBioCompute Consortium to support industry standards for data access, discovery, and cloud computation.

In addition to this partnership, we’re continuing to develop a suite of open source tools, such asVariant Transforms, to structure and integrate biomedical datasets using BigQuery, our highly-scalable managed data warehouse solution.

We are proud to be working with the NIH to dramatically increase the number of biomedical datasets available on Google Cloud. By helping researchers to discover and authenticate against these datasets using open standards, and by making these datasets ready for researchers to perform scalable analytics and data science, we hope to usher in the next generation of biomedical discoveries. For more information on healthcare and life sciences solutions on Google Cloud, visit our website.

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Empowering businesses and developers to do more with AI

AI has evolved dramatically in the last two decades. Technologies like image recognition and machine translation are now a part of everyday life for millions. AI has transformed industries all over the world, and created entirely new ones. And in the process, it promises an increase in quality of life and work never before imagined. But there’s still much more we can do—after all, AI is still a nascent field of many opportunities and challenges.

AI is empowerment, and we want to democratize that power for everyone and every business—from retail to agriculture, education to healthcare. AI is no longer a niche in the tech world—it's the differentiator for businesses in every industry. And we’re committed to delivering the tools that will revolutionize them.

Today, we’re sharing news on a number of new products and enhancements to do just that:

• Cloud AutoML Vision, Natural Language, and Translation, available now in beta

• New enhancements to Dialogflow Enterprise Edition, available now in beta

• A new solution, Contact Center AI, available now in alpha

Cloud AutoML: The next step in democratization

A significant gap exists between the extremes of what’s currently possible with machine learning. At one end, experienced practitioners such as data scientists use tools like TensorFlow and Cloud ML Engine to build custom solutions from the ground up. At the other end, pre-trained machine learning models like Cloud Vision API  deliver immediate results with minimal investment and technical proficiency. But what about the countless customers that fall in between? Many have needs beyond what’s available with pre-trained models, but don’t have the skills or resources to build their own custom solutions.

To address this middle ground, earlier this year we announced Cloud AutoML. It makes it possible for anyone to extend powerful ML models to suit the specific needs of their domain, without requiring any specialized knowledge in machine learning or coding. Our first release, AutoML Vision, extends the Cloud Vision API to recognize entirely new categories of images. After refining the experience with our alpha users, we're excited that today, AutoML Vision goes into public beta.

But image classification is just one of countless applications of machine learning, and we’re dedicated to addressing as many challenges as possible. Today, we’re introducing two new AutoML offerings.AutoML Natural Language helps you automatically predict custom text categories specific to domains our customers desire. And with AutoML Translation you can upload translated language pairs to train your own custom translation model.

We’ve already heard from many of our customers that they’re eager to explore how AutoML can help them take advantage of machine learning.

“As one of the world's largest publishers of monthly magazines, with 25 U.S. titles and almost 300 international editions, the Hearst team is always looking for better ways to manage content,” says Esfand Pourmand, Senior Vice President, Revenue of Hearst Newspapers. “We are looking forward to using AutoML Natural Language to apply our custom universal taxonomy to our content. AutoML Natural Language allows us to create custom models that meet our specific needs, with higher accuracy than other solutions we considered.”

“Nikkei Group is a leading media organization with trusted news sources around the world—from The Nikkei, our flagship Japanese-language paper, to our English-language publication Nikkei Asian Review, to the Financial Times. Translating content so that it can be distributed and shared globally is an absolute necessity for us,” says Hiroyuki Watanabe, Managing Director, Digital Business, Nikkei. “AutoML Translation has the level of customization we need, and we've been impressed by its accuracy.

“Keller Williams Realty is using AutoML Vision to bring to market the most advanced home search experience for consumers,” says Neil Dholakia, Chief Product Officer, Keller Williams. “By training a custom model to recognize common elements of furnishings and architecture, customers can automatically search home listing photos for specific features like ‘granite countertops,’ or even more general styles like ‘modern.’”

You can learn more about AutoML on our website.

Advancing what’s possible with AI

Over the last year, we’ve done a lot to make AI not just more powerful, but more accessible. For example, last year we introduced our Cloud TPUs, custom processors designed from scratch to dramatically accelerate machine learning tasks. Today, we’re announcing that our third generation of Cloud TPUs are available in alpha, making support for larger amounts of machine learning computation possible for more businesses.

We’ve been amazed at what our customers have accomplished with Cloud TPUs. For example, TPUs allowed eBay to reduce the training time of their visual search model by a factor of almost 100—from months to days.

We’re also continually thinking about how we can turn the latest AI research into products that make AI easier to use. Today, we launched several important updates to our core machine learning APIs. Cloud Vision API now recognizes handwriting, supports additional file types (PDF and TIFF) and product search, and can identify where an object is located within an image. We’re also launching improvements to Cloud Text-to-Speech, such as multilingual access to voices generated by DeepMind WaveNet technology and the ability to optimize for the type of speaker from which your speech is intended to play. And in Cloud Speech-to-Text, we’re including the ability to identify what language is spoken as well as different speakers in a conversation, word-level confidence scores, and multi-channel recognition so you can record each participant separately in multi-participant recordings.

Using AI to enhance how we work

We're also in the early stages of an evolution in the way people and machines work together. With intelligent tools that offload repetition and support human strengths like creativity and problem solving, we're demonstrating that AI’s greatest potential lies in complementing and enhancing human skills, not replacing them.

One way we aim to do exactly that is by enhancing the contact center experience. When we studied the challenges faced by real contact centers every day, we found that customers often have simple transactional or informational requests. For contact center employees, this can mean repetitive work, increased pressure on caller turnover, and less time to solve complex problems. For the callers themselves, it can mean frustrating menus, longer hold times and a diminished experience overall. This got us thinking about how we could use AI to dramatically improve the experiences of both customers and the contact center representatives that help them.

Our vision began with Dialogflow Enterprise Edition, our comprehensive development suite for building conversational agents. We introduced it last November, and more than 600,000 developers across a range of industries are already putting it to use. We saw that many of Dialogflow’s features could dramatically improve efficiency across an enterprise contact center, but it wasn’t yet a comprehensive solution. Today, we’re announcing new capabilities to complete that picture.

Dialogflow already offers accurate speech recognition through Cloud Speech-to-Text. To this we added new features like Text to Speech capability via DeepMind’s WaveNet and the Dialogflow Phone Gateway for telephony integration.

But our true goal is to empower a contact center's human agents, as well as the customers that rely on them. To do this, we built a complete solution with our partners that includes Dialogflow Enterprise Edition, as well as additional capabilities that are particularly useful for contact centers—all with a commitment to using a responsible, human-centered approach to AI. We call it Contact Center AI, and we think it has the potential to elevate every aspect of the customer service experience, from start to finish. Let’s talk about how it works.

When a call is placed, the caller is immediately greeted by a Virtual Agent that answers questions and fulfills tasks all on its own. Google has several technologies that help users take action or communicate over the phone, and while Contact Center AI and the recently announced Duplex share some underlying components, they have distinct technology stacks and aims overall.

When a caller’s needs surpass the Virtual Agent, it transitions to a human representative. From there, the system shifts to a supporting role whereby Contact Center AI’s Agent Assist system supports the conversation and provides the agent with relevant information. Leveraging Dialogflow’s Knowledge Connectors, the assistive technology surfaces the most relevant knowledge articles from a company's knowledge base, ensuring contact center agents are proactively presented with the best solutions for customers in near real time.

The result is a flexible solution that adapts to the needs of each and every call, and provides a seamless experience between live and virtual agents, playing as big or as small a role as the situation demands, It’s compliant with our data privacy and governance policies, and it does it all without infrastructure, on a platform that scales as much or as little as you need.

Lastly, we’re working with several of our Contact Center AI partners—including Appian, Chatbase, Cisco, Five9, Genesys, Mitel, Quantiphi, RingCentral, Twilio, UiPath, Upwire, and Vonage—to engage with us around the responsible use of Cloud AI. This includes best practices such as disclosing when customers are talking to a bot, and education around issues such as unconscious bias and the future of work. We want to make sure we’re using technology in ways employees and users will find fair, empowering, and worthy of their trust.

Contact Center AI is the first of many solutions we have in development to enhance how we work. For example, our Talent Solution is built on top of deep learning matching technology to improve enterprise talent acquisition—saving recruiters time by finding the best past applicants for a role, and helping candidates find the right jobs that match their skills and interests. We’ll share more on Contact Center AI, Talent Solution, and other AI solutions in the coming weeks. In the meantime, you can read a more detailed wrap-up of the new features in Dialogflow Enterprise Edition as well as our newly-announced Contact Center AI in this post.

Continuing to bring AI to everyone

From hardware like Cloud TPUs to software like AutoML and vertical solutions like Contact Center AI, we’re working to advance the state of the art while lowering the barrier to entry — serving customers with a wide spectrum of needs and expertise. And we’re doing this with the aim to enhance the human experience at the center of it all.

To learn more about machine learning on Google Cloud, visit our website.

by via The Keyword