From Microsoft splitting Teams from its Office Suite to Google potentially acquiring HubSpot, a lot is happening between these two tech giants.

Both companies continuously explore avenues to enrich customer engagement and streamline operational processes. This quest for enhanced connectivity and understanding of the consumer landscape is where integrating with, or in Google’s case, acquiring Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms like the online marketing software company HubSpot becomes a strategic imperative.

Companies like Google can leverage sophisticated analytics, personalized marketing tools, and comprehensive project management solutions by considering the incorporation or acquisition of the platform. The potential acquisition by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, of HubSpot—valued at US$35 billion, as exclusively reported by Reuters—underscores the importance of CRM systems in achieving these goals.

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Alphabet’s eye on HubSpot

Alphabet’s contemplation of making a bid for HubSpot emerges as a noteworthy move in the tech industry, particularly under the intensified regulatory gaze of President Joe Biden’s administration in the United States. This acquisition, if pursued, would mark a significant venture for a leading tech entity into high-value deal-making amidst regulatory scrutiny.

This potential deal could represent Alphabet’s most substantial acquisition to date, offering an opportunity to strategically employ its substantial cash reserves, which stood at US$110.9 billion at the end of the last year.

Recent discussions have taken place between Alphabet and investment bankers from Morgan Stanley regarding a possible bid for HubSpot. These talks have focused on the bid’s valuation and the likelihood of obtaining approval from antitrust regulators. However, Alphabet has yet to extend an offer to HubSpot, and the outcome remains uncertain, as noted by sources who wished to remain anonymous while sharing insights on these private considerations.

In response to inquiries about these discussions, a representative from HubSpot stated the company does not engage in speculation or rumors, emphasizing their ongoing commitment to their business and clientele. Requests for comments from Alphabet and Morgan Stanley have not received immediate responses.

Following the revelation of these discussions, HubSpot’s stock experienced an 11% increase to US$693, whereas Alphabet’s shares saw a slight decrease of 1%, pricing at US$153.34.

Since its public debut in 2014, HubSpot has carved a niche in providing marketing software to small and medium-sized enterprises. Despite reporting a net loss of US$176.3 million in 2023 from revenues of US$2.2 billion, the company’s growth potential has captivated investors, as evidenced by a 50% surge in its stock price over the past year.

Google Alphabet eyes HubSpot acquisition (Source – X)

The future of CRM: What this means for Google and HubSpot

Currently, the discussions about Google potentially acquiring HubSpot are speculative, with no confirmation regarding whether this collaboration will materialize. Should such an acquisition proceed, it represents a significant shift for both companies.

Integrating HubSpot’s CRM capabilities could provide Google with deeper insights into customer behavior and preferences, potentially enhancing its user engagement through the use of HubSpot’s analytics and marketing tools.

The acquisition would enable Google to broaden its portfolio, especially within the CRM space—a sector where it has not yet established a strong foothold. This expansion could open up access to new markets and customer segments, particularly targeting small to medium-sized businesses that predominantly use HubSpot.

Furthermore, Google’s cloud computing services could see substantial benefits from incorporating HubSpot’s CRM solutions, potentially improving Google’s position relative to competitors like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

Positioning the acquisition as a competitive enhancement in the CRM and broader software market could assist Google in navigating the complexities of regulatory approval, presenting the deal as a countermeasure to the market dominance of entities like Salesforce and Microsoft.

Such an acquisition could also quicken Google’s growth within the burgeoning CRM market, offering a pathway to expand its market share and influence significantly.

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Regulatory scrutiny and market dynamics

This acquisition speculation comes at a time when Google faces multiple antitrust allegations, including a significant lawsuit challenging its dominance in online search. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is exploring new growth avenues following a shortfall in advertising sales, as Google and YouTube vie for ad budgets against platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Amazon.com.

The technology sector is witnessing a resurgence in deal activity, exemplified by Synopsys’ agreement to acquire Ansys for around US$35 billion and Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s acquisition of Juniper Networks for US$14 billion. In the first quarter alone, technology mergers and acquisitions have surged over 42% year-on-year to approximately US$154 billion, as reported by Dealogic, highlighting the sector’s dynamism.

Overall, Google acquiring HubSpot could mark a pivotal development, potentially creating new synergies between their technologies and market strategies. This development could offer both companies opportunities for growth and innovation within the dynamic landscape of CRM technology.

The post Google parent Alphabet eyes HubSpot: A potential acquisition shaping the future of CRM appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud are just some of the major cloud providers that businesses rely on heavily today. As businesses continue to invest in more technologies to improve their productivity and efficiency, the cloud will be a key component in their decisions. Be it using more AI applications or getting more insights from data, the cloud will continue to play an important role for businesses in all industries.

According to a report by Gartner, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 20.4% to a total of US$678.8 billion in 2024, up from US$563.6 billion in 2023. The report also states that all segments of the cloud market are expected to see growth in 2024. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is forecast to experience the highest end-user spending growth in 2024 at 26.6%, followed by platform-as-a-service (PaaS) at 21.5%.

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Another key trend driving cloud spending is the continued rise of industry cloud platforms. Industry cloud platforms address industry-relevant business outcomes by combining underlying software-as-a-service (SaaS), PaaS and IaaS services into a whole-product offering with composable capabilities. By 2027, Gartner predicts that more than 70% of enterprises will use industry cloud platforms to accelerate their business initiatives, up from less than 15% in 2023.

Google Cloud is hoping to gain more cloud market share. (Source – Statista).

The booming cloud market

Cloud service providers are also hoping to make the most of the demand by offering the best products and services to their customers. According to a report by Statista, in Q2 2023, AWS holds the largest market share in the cloud market, at 32%. This is followed by Azure at 22% and Google Cloud at 11%. China’s Alibaba Cloud commands 4% of the global market while IBM Cloud and Salesforce have a 3% market share each. Oracle and Tencent Cloud also both have a 2% market share.

Despite dominating the market, AWS is aware of the demands of customers and continues to improve its pricing. This includes launching a Cost Optimization Hub so that businesses will be able to manage their cloud costs better. But even so, cloud costs have been skyrocketing, especially with the demand for more AI workloads across the business world.

Two of the biggest challenges businesses face when it comes to using the cloud are the increasing cost of managing their cloud and having the right talent to work for them. Often, the high costs of data migration can be a deciding factor in whether or not a business decides to work with a particular cloud provider.

While there are managed service providers that can help businesses with these issues, the reality is that businesses want the flexibility and ability to move their data or even switch cloud providers at the end of their contracts.

But here’s the thing. Cloud providers want to ensure their customers remain with them, and they do this in two ways. The first is by giving the best service to their customers and ensuring the costs are manageable. The second is by making the costs of moving to another cloud service provider extremely high so that the customer will have no choice but to remain with them if they want to avoid paying high data transfer fees.

Now, Google Cloud is hoping to disrupt this practice.

Is Google Cloud disrupting the cloud market? (Image by Shutterstock).

Google Cloud makes it cheaper to switch cloud providers

“Starting today, Google Cloud customers who wish to stop using Google Cloud and migrate their data to another cloud provider and/or on-premises can take advantage of free network data transfer to migrate their data out of Google Cloud. This applies to all customers globally,” said Amit Zavery, GM/VP, head of platform at Google Cloud.

Google Cloud is making it easier for customers to switch to their competitors. But why is Google Cloud doing that? Well, it could be because Google Cloud is extremely confident in its products and services and feels that customers are already getting the best they can in the industry. it probably isn’t that, but it could be. Google, after all, has never been shy of trumpeting its own superiority in any market in which it’s invested.

True enough, AWS is known for being relatively more affordable. And other cloud providers make it nearly impossible for customers to even consider switching due to their ridiculous data transfer costs.

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Zavery points out that certain legacy providers use their on-premises software monopolies to create cloud monopolies, using restrictive licensing practices that lock in customers and warp competition. He added that this complex web of licensing restrictions includes picking and choosing who their customers can work with and how; charging 5x the cost if customers decide to use certain competitors’ clouds; and limiting interoperability of must-have software with competitors’ cloud infrastructure.

“These and other restrictions have no technical basis and may impose a 300% cost increase on customers. In contrast, the cost for customers to migrate data out of a cloud provider is minimal,” said Zavery.

As such, Google Cloud wants to make it easier for customers to move from one provider to another as it does little to improve choice if customers remain locked in with restrictive licenses. Zavery believes that customers should choose a cloud provider because it makes sense for their business, not because their legacy provider has locked them in with overly restrictive contracting terms or punitive licensing practices.

“The promise of the cloud is to allow businesses and governments to seamlessly scale their technology use. Today’s announcement builds on the multiple measures in recent months to provide more value and improve data transfer for large and small organizations running workloads on Google Cloud,” he concluded.

It is also important to note that there are certain terms and conditions to this. Businesses who wish to move away from Google Cloud can start by contacting their Google Cloud Support team.

The Google Cloud Support team will review the request and notify the customer of when they may initiate the migration of all its workloads and data from Google Cloud to another cloud service provider or an on-premises data center for free in anticipation of terminating their Google Cloud agreement. The customer will then have 60 days following this notification to complete their migration out of Google Cloud.

The post Google Cloud customers can switch service providers for free appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

AI is revolutionizing supply chain management and logistics, and providing companies with a competitive advantage in a dynamic and uncertain market. Specifically, AI can be used in logistics and supply chain management to improve efficiency, accuracy and resilience in various aspects and operations.

In Southeast Asia, AI is a game-changer for logistics and supply chain management. Since the disruptions brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, organizations have been using AI to ensure business continuity. And now, with generative AI solutions being developed as well, the industry is seeing more than just automation and route management for deliveries.

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Currently, AI in logistics and supply chain management can help organizations with:

• Optimizing routing and delivery – AI can use real-time data, such as traffic, weather, road conditions, and customer preferences, to find the best routes and schedules for delivery. This reduces fuel consumption, emissions, costs and delivery times.
• Demand forecasting – AI can analyze data from multiple sources, such as sales history, market trends, weather, customer behavior, and social media, to generate accurate predictions of future demand. Companies are able to optimize inventory levels, streamline supply chain processes and reduce the risks of stockouts or overstocking.
• Improve loading process – AI can help automate the loading and unloading of trucks, containers, and warehouses, using computer vision, robotics, and sensors. This increases safety, speed and accuracy as well as reduces labor costs and human errors.

With generative AI, businesses in the industry could automate clerical work, predict operational results, factor in tariffs and even negotiate shipping rates. As sustainability continues to be thrust into the limelight, generative AI can play a pivotal role in creating environmentally friendly supply chains.

Generative AI is revolutionizing logistics and supply chain management.

SingPost and Google Cloud

One company that has been accelerating its digital journey in logistics and supply chain management is Singapore Post Limited or SingPost. A leading postal and e-commerce logistics provider in Asia Pacific, SingPost’s portfolio of businesses spans national and international postal services, warehousing and fulfillment, international freight forwarding, and last-mile delivery, serving customers in more than 220 global destinations.

The company has just partnered with Google Cloud to accelerate its digital transformation journey and drive its next phase of sustainable growth. SingPost has already migrated all the IT workloads hosted in its on-premises data centers to Google Cloud and is in the process of harmonizing and consolidating its technology stack, establishing a robust and secure foundation to power accelerated AI-driven innovation.

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Using Google Cloud’s AI-optimized infrastructure, SingPost has not only yielded cost savings of 30% in IT operations but is also capable of handling complex AI workloads, while ensuring cost-efficiency, scalability, and sustainability. Added to which, SingPost is deploying Google Cloud’s BeyondCorp Enterprise platform to enforce zero-trust security principles like multi-factor authentication and device verification, ensuring that only authorized staff can access proprietary company information.

Coupled with strategic investment in high-growth markets, this deployment has resulted in international logistics generating 86% of the group’s revenue – a key milestone in its ongoing transformation into a technology-driven logistics enterprise.

“Our positive engagement with Google Cloud to develop an AI solution—through its joint AI Trailblazers initiative with the Singapore Government—gave us the confidence to embark on the next step of this journey,” said Noel Singgih, group chief information officer at SingPost.

SingPost also developed an AI solution to streamline its e-commerce logistics operations. (Image by Google).

AI for logistics and supply chain management

SingPost’s AI solution for streamlining its e-commerce logistics operations cuts out manual re-entry of partner and supplier information from trade documents into its database.

That frees up staff from the tedious task of having to dig through document archives to find the information they need, letting them focus on making strategic decisions and delivering high-quality customer interactions.

The solution is built on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, foundation models, and Document AI. The AI solution transforms unstructured data from trade documents into a searchable repository, with a generative AI-powered chat interface that understands natural language queries and brings accurate and relevant information to the surface.

Enhanced by Google Cloud, SingCloud aims to scale the use of its solution, to optimize supply chain orchestration across its logistics network and facilitate faster deliveries.

At the same time, SingPost is also using Vertex AI to explore solutions for several other use cases, including automating internal legal document reviews and providing more personalized interactions to enhance customer service.

All the while, SingPost will retain complete control over its data, including prompts and user inputs at inference time when using Vertex AI. That means the data does not need to leave SingPost’s Google Cloud environment, is encrypted both in transit and at rest, and is not accessible by Google Cloud or any other external parties.

“By investing in AI development and collaborator platforms with built-in privacy, control, security, and compliance capabilities, SingPost is empowering every employee—regardless of their role or function—to identify and capitalize on new opportunities for work optimization. This serves as a strong example of how a large enterprise can move swiftly to extract diverse benefits from generative AI adoption,” said Mark Micallef, managing director, Southeast Asia, Google Cloud.

The post Supercharging logistics and supply chain management with generative AI  appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

The sovereign cloud is increasingly in demand by organizations as they look to meet compliance and regulatory requirements set by governments in the countries in which they operate. While in the past, only regulated industries like financial services would need such capabilities, today organizations from all industries feel that the sovereign cloud is a more secure option for them.

Data sovereignty is a legal concept that defines the authority and jurisdiction over data. It means that the data that is collected, stored, processed, or transferred within a country or region is subject to the laws and regulations of that country or region. Different countries may have different rules and requirements for data protection, privacy, security, and governance, so where the data is physically stored becomes important in terms of what companies can do with it.

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In Southeast Asia, the demand for sovereign cloud has increased, with cloud service providers catering to specific needs for organizations. According to the latest available statistics, Southeast Asia and Europe are both seeing greater demand for such capabilities.

At the same time, the increasing adoption of AI means that organizations need to be able to ensure their data is not compromised. This is achieved by ensuring the data is under their control, meaning that it needs to be stored and accessible easily to them locally.

Google Cloud CEO on the new data residency guarantees.

Google unveils data residency capabilities for AI workloads

Given the need for companies to be able to control where their data is stored in light of growing data sovereignty and global regulatory requirements, Google has announced that customers using Google Cloud’s generative AI services can choose to store their data at rest in any of the ten available countries across North America, Europe, and Asia.

“With our new data residency commitments for Vertex AI generative capabilities, we commit to storing customer data in customer-selected locations consistent with Google Cloud’s General Service Terms. This specifically includes generative AI on Vertex AI, which includes PaLM 2, Codey, and Imagen models, as well as the Text Embeddings and Multimodal Embeddings APIs,” said Warren Barkley, senior director, product management, Cloud AI, Google Cloud.

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In Asia, customer data storage options are in Japan, Singapore and Korea. Barkley also explained that Google handles customer data and privacy in the following ways:

• Customers control their data and models and control access to them. Organizations dictate who can access their data and models and how these assets can be used.
• Customers control where and how data and models are stored. Organizations can opt to store data in locations they select, preventing deployments outside specified geographic boundaries.
• Customer data is never used by Google. Google does not use customer data to train its models, or models used by others, without permission.
• Customer data is available when it’s needed. AI products are held to the same availability standards as other Google Cloud services.
• Customers enjoy enterprise-grade security and privacy defaults. Whether for specific security needs or to meet regulatory requirements, Google Cloud’s AI services let organizations apply privacy protections and fine-grained security controls across their data and models.

“Additionally, Google Cloud stands behind these guarantees with technical controls, contractual terms, and industry-recognized certifications and audits. That means when organizations build or tune models on our AI platform, our shared fate approach to risk management means we partner with the organization from day one to protect data and models. These efforts include a collaborative approach to cybersecurity and the development of our Secure AI framework (SAIF), which offers practical considerations to help enterprises mitigate AI-specific risks,” explained Barkley.

CSIT and Google Cloud will be piloting the use of Google Distributed Cloud Hosted (GDC Hosted) to support CSIT’s effort to harness AI in tackling Singapore’s defense and security challenges.(Source – Shutterstock)

Singapore leads data residency in Southeast Asia

Barkley also mentioned that Singapore was picked by Google because of the country’s development and focus on AI. The country is leading the development of AI use cases and adoption in the region, especially with regulations permitting it to do so with minimal complexity.

Yet, there is still the need to meet data sovereignty requirements. Following the announcement, the Centre for Strategic Infocomm Technologies (CSIT) and Google Cloud will be piloting the use of Google Distributed Cloud Hosted (GDC Hosted) to support CSIT’s effort to harness AI in tackling Singapore’s defense and security challenges.

A member of the Defence Technology Community, CSIT would surely be required to work with a technology provider that can guarantee them data sovereignty. With Google Cloud now making Singapore a key country for data at rest, it only makes sense for CSIT to collaborate with Google Cloud. As part of the pilot, CSIT will trial the use of GDC Hosted on-premises, tapping on the solution’s built-in data management and pre-trained machine learning capabilities to process sensitive data.

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GDC Hosted provides organizations in the public sector and highly regulated industries with a cloud platform that requires no connectivity to Google Cloud or the public internet for its operation and continued management. That gives organizations the ability to run workloads in their data centers with the functionality, flexibility, and scale of cloud services.

At the same time, organizations will also have the ability to form clusters across multiple GDC Hosted zones for added protection against system failures, and more flexible, modular options for adding extra compute resources like the graphics processing units (GPUs) designed for running demanding AI workloads.

Speaking of AI workloads, GDC hosted is designed to support data, operational, and software sovereignty requirements, which includes advanced AI and database services like Vertex AI and AlloyDB Omni, and increases customer control and transparency over sensitive data. Updates to GDC Hosted, including Google Cloud’s pre-trained AI models, are accessed through secure hardware and installed by the customer themselves. As a user of GDC Hosted, CSIT retains total operational control over all data and software, ensuring the safety and security of mission-critical workloads.

“CSIT develops digital capabilities for defense and security, such as in cyberdefense. The collaboration with Google Cloud on GDC Hosted allows us to tap on its expertise in data management, cloud technologies, and AI while keeping sensitive data secure,” said Darren Teo, chief executive of CSIT.

Google and Royal Thai Government (Source – Google)

Google and AI: from Singapore to Thailand and Malaysia

Apart from the updates in Singapore, Google also announced plans for Thailand and Malaysia. The announcements, which are focused on AI and skills development, will not only boost the technological capabilities of both countries, but also give Google a stronger footprint in the region.

For Thailand, Google announced a strategic collaboration to boost Thailand’s digital competitiveness and accelerate AI innovation. The agreement will see the parties working jointly to instill four foundational pillars that are necessary for the country to thrive in the AI economy.

The four pillars are:

• Advancing digital infrastructure investments – Google is exploring the potential establishment of a new in-country Google data center to power digital services.
• Promoting secure and responsible AI adoption to transform public service delivery – the Thai Government and Google will embark on joint initiatives to accelerate bold and responsible AI development and application across ministries, government agencies, and key industries.
• Anchoring on cloud-first policies – Google will support MDES’s development of a Go Cloud-first Strategy for Thailand, contributing policy and technology expertise to ensure the delivery of resilient, cost-efficient, and innovation-driven digital infrastructure for the country.
• Making digital skills more accessible to Thais – Google will be offering 12,000 additional Google Career Certificate scholarships under its Samart Skills program by partnering with the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society and the Board of Investment of Thailand.

Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer; chief financial officer for Alphabet and Google, commented, “Guided by our local mission to Leave No Thai Behind, our partnership with the Government of Thailand seeks to strengthen its digital competitiveness and further advance its cloud-first digital transformation. We see immense potential for technology to be a powerful enabler for businesses and communities. Together we aim to improve the delivery of public services and scale the adoption of AI technologies with Google Cloud. Importantly, we will equip Thais to participate in the digital economy through talent upskilling and by ensuring secure, reliable and innovative digital infrastructure for people and businesses.”

Google and the Government of Malaysia (Source – Google)

Meanwhile, the Government of Malaysia and Google announced a strategic collaboration to create inclusive growth opportunities for more Malaysians and homegrown companies in the fast-growing digital economy. The collaboration brings both parties together to help businesses of all sizes advance their digital competitiveness through skilling programs, investment in digital infrastructure, responsible AI innovation, and cloud-first policies.

To provide Malaysians with more digital training opportunities, Google Cloud, CloudMile, and Trainocate are making five digital learning paths available at no cost. Accessible through the Go Cloud program—which aims to upskill 300,000 Malaysians by 2026—the learning paths consist of online courses to help individuals better apply generative AI, data analytics, and cloud-based productivity tools.

The Malaysian government and Google Cloud will also embark on joint AI launchpad initiatives to create new jobs, enhance public service delivery, and help local companies tap into global markets.

“The partnership we are announcing with the government of Malaysia aligns Google’s local mission of Advancing Malaysia Together with the government’s goal to create a supportive ecosystem for innovation that includes more meaningful and equitable job opportunities. To advance these shared goals, we intend to assist Malaysian organizations in addressing real-world challenges using AI, and utilizing Google Cloud technologies to rapidly implement solutions for economic growth and public good,” mentioned Porat.

The post Google announces data residency locations and AI partnerships appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Generative AI in cybersecurity continues to be in demand as companies look to deal with security challenges. While more companies have unveiled a variety of generative AI security tools, having them work together can be challenging.

For Google, using generative AI to deal with security challenges can be a game-changer. Generative AI is already being heavily used in other applications. Naturally, cybersecurity and other security applications would eventually find a use for it too.

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At Google Cloud Next 2023, Google unveiled many upgrades and enhancements to its AI solutions. With generative AI at the core, most of these solutions are meant to improve business productivity and output. In fact, Google reported that 70% of tech unicorns are already using Google’s products for their solutions.

During the summit, Google announced that several security products will have AI incorporated into them. Among these plans is the idea of integrating Duet AI into security products, as well as bringing innovation across security operations and cloud platforms.

Google Cloud Security AI Workbench. (Image – Google)

What is Duet AI?

Duet AI is Google’s AI-powered assistant. Unveiled earlier this year, Duet AI has now been integrated into almost all of Google’s solutions and offerings. Built on top of Google’s large foundation models, Duet AI is specially trained to help businesses be more productive on Google Cloud.

The AI-powered assistant uses the Vertex AI platform to provide personal and contextualized AI assistance, while ensuring data is private and secure. At Google Cloud Next 2023, Google announced that Duet AI will be integrated into its Workspace and other cloud capabilities.

In cybersecurity, Duet AI will be added into three key products to help businesses not only deal with security challenges, but also provide valuable insights on threats and manage their cybersecurity a lot better.

A Tweet on Duet AI.

A holistic approach to AI in security

“We are taking a holistic approach to both securing AI, as well as infusing AI to enhance security products. We start with posture, governance, and compliance controls for AI workloads, both those built on Vertex AI and others that customers may bring and deploy in Google Cloud. Our Google Cloud Security AI Workbench is an industry-first extensible platform powered by our specialized security foundation model, Sec-PaLM 2, and we use it to enable our own first-party applications as well as partner and customer apps with AI-driven functionality,” commented Sunil Potti, VP/GM for Google Cloud Security in a blog post.

Specifically, the three key products Duet AI will be added to are:

Duet AI in Mandiant Threat Intelligence – Will help surface prevalent tactics, techniques and procedures that threat actors use by summarizing threat intelligence into an easy-to-comprehend format. This will let security teams understand Google reports about a threat, including how it targets their organization, as well as to make threat intelligence actionable across their organization.

Duet AI in Mandiant Threat Intelligence (Source – Google)

Duet AI in Chronicle Security Operations – Simplifies search and allows complex data analysis and threat detection engineering, to help reduce toil and elevate the effectiveness of defenders. Chronicle can automatically provide a summary of what’s happening, as well as giving content and guidance on important threats. It can also offer recommendations for how to respond to those threats.

Duet AI will also power Chronicle’s new natural language search, letting defenders enter questions in natural language. Chronicle will generate the query and present a fully mapped syntax for search.

Duet AI in Chronicle Security Operations (Image – Google)

Duet AI in Security Command Center – Teams will be able to stay ahead of adversaries with near-instant analysis of security findings and possible attack paths. Designed for simplicity, even non-specialists can easily defend their organization.

Duet AI in Security Command Center (Image – Google)

The Mandiant Hunt

Duet AI in Chronicle, the AI-powered assistant, will be part of the Chronicle Security Operations, which is an essential security suite for organizations. In addition to which, Google also introduced Mandiant Hunt for Chronicle Security Operations to help businesses protect their digital assets from threats.

The managed threat-hunting service integrates Mandiant’s frontline intelligence and expertise with Google Cloud technology to proactively search for undetected attacks. With the ability to find threats missed by traditional detection mechanisms, Mandiant experts build hypotheses using a robust and adaptable collection and analysis strategy, alongside traditional automated hunting that searches for indicators of compromise. This approach focuses on patterns of behavior against techniques and procedures seen in the wild.

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Put simply, Mandiant Hunt offers businesses:

• A means to close the skills gap by gaining elite-level, specialty security skills without the burden of hiring, tooling, and training.
• Confidence that they can defend against the latest threats with the help they need to find novel or hidden attacks, as well as the insight they need to improve their security controls.
• And the context they need to make informed decisions with the necessary tools in Chronicle Security Operations to quickly respond.

“Unlike other security operations platforms, Chronicle allows customers to ingest their security data and store it for 12 months by default. This cache of data can help security teams uncover newly discovered threat actor behaviors in older security telemetry, a valuable tool for tracking down previously unknown malicious activity.

“Chronicle’s powerful ability to quickly analyze and search growing amounts of security telemetry for anomalies boosts the hunt teams’ ability to test and refine threat hunting hypotheses” explained Ed Murphy, Product Manager and Shelly Tzoumas, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Google Cloud in a blog post.

The blog post also explained that the hunting activity is informed by real-time threat intelligence from Mandiant, as well as signals from the devices and users protected by Google Cloud and VirusTotal’s intelligence of more than nine billion files and URLs. Businesses receive findings that explain what the expert hunters looked for, how and where they looked, and what they found, mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework so they can take decisive action.

Mandiant Hunt is currently available in preview mode, with general availability expected by the end of the year.

The post Google unveils AI solutions to deal with security challenges appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Generative AI remains the topic of the hour, as almost every major tech company continues to announce new applications for it. Naturally, generative AI dominated the announcements at Google Cloud Next 2023.

In his keynote address at the summit, Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, said the company has taken an AI-first approach for the last seven years. Pichai also believes that making AI helpful for everyone is the most important way to deliver Google’s mission for the next decade and has invested in the very best tooling, foundation models, and infrastructure.

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“Today, we are using generative AI to reimagine experience and take more of the work out of searching. We call this the Search Generative Experience (SGE). SGE uses advanced AI. To help you get the gist of a top generative AI search, we are drawing on years of insights and technology development to harness and deploy AI at scale. Google Cloud is how we provide these same insights, tools and platforms to help you all innovate too,” said Pichai.

At Google Cloud Next, Pichai and Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud’s CEO, announced several new generative AI solutions that are expected to help businesses achieve greater outcomes with AI. Tech Wire Asia takes a look at some of the announcements.

Sundar Pichai, Google CEO speaking at Google Cloud Next 2023.

AI-optimized Infrastructure

When it comes to startups, Google Cloud remains one of the preferred choices for developing AI infrastructure. According to James Lee, General Manager for Startups and AI, Google’s AI-optimized infrastructure is the platform of choice for startups building generative AI. In fact, he mentioned that more than half of all funded generative AI startups are Google Cloud customers, including 70% of generative AI unicorns (those valued at more than US$ 1 billion).

“Startups like Bending Spoons, Faraday, Jasper, Replit and Typeface are helping people utilize generative AI in many of their everyday tasks at work. Important AI tooling applications from Aible, Anyscale, Gitlab, Gretel, Labelbox, Snorkel AI and Weights & Biases are available on Google Cloud to help others build their own generative AI experiences. And important model-builders and researchers like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Character.AI, Cohere, Midjourney and Osmo are training and developing models utilizing Google Cloud infrastructure, GPUs and TPUs,” said Lee.

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As these companies leverage Google Cloud’s AI infrastructure technologies, TPUs and GPUs, Google has announced significant enhancements to them as well at Google Cloud Next.

First, Google Cloud is expanding its AI-optimized infrastructure portfolio with Cloud TPU v5e, the most cost-efficient, versatile, and scalable Cloud TPU to date. TPU v5e offers integration with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Vertex AI, and leading frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, and TensorFlow, so businesses can get started with easy-to-use, familiar interfaces. Cloud TPU v5e is currently available in public preview in Google Cloud’s Las Vegas and Columbus cloud regions, with plans to expand to other regions, including Google Cloud’s Singapore cloud region later this year.

Google Cloud also announced that its A3 VMs, based on NVIDIA H100 GPUs and delivered as a GPU supercomputer, will be generally available next month to power large-scale AI models. The A3 VM features dual next-generation 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, eight NVIDIA H100 GPUs per VM, and 2TB of host memory. Built on the latest NVIDIA HGX H100 platform, the A3 VM delivers 3.6 TB/s of bisectional bandwidth between the eight GPUs via fourth-generation NVIDIA NVLink technology.

Google Cloud is expanding its AI-optimized infrastructure portfolio with Cloud TPU v5e. (Image – Google)

Duet AI in Google Cloud

Unveiled in May at Google I/O, Duet AI is revolutionizing the way users work with Google Cloud, which will help customers boost their productivity, gain competitive advantages, and ultimately improve their bottom line. At Google Cloud Next, Google announced enhancements to Duet AI for both Google Workspace and Google Cloud.

For Google Cloud, Duet AI can now provide AI assistance across more surfaces, infusing the power of generative AI across the cloud to help with application development, operations, database management and migration, data analysis and visualization, as well as cybersecurity.

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“Duet AI in Google Cloud provides expert assistance across your entire software development lifecycle. This includes code generation, source citation, test coverage, designing and publishing APIs, migrating and modernizing applications, and much more.

With Duet AI, developers can use natural language to quickly understand complex code and APIs, follow best coding practices, quickly generate unit tests, and more. Duet AI’s code and chat assistance are available in our development environments such as the Google Cloud console, Cloud Workstations and Cloud Shell Editor,” said Brad Calder, Vice President and GM for Google Cloud Platform and Technical Infrastructure.

Duet AI in Google Cloud announcements include advancements for:

• Software development: Duet AI provides expert assistance across the entire software development lifecycle, enabling developers to stay in a flow state longer by minimizing context switching to help them be more productive. In addition to code completion and code generation, it can assist with code refactoring and building APIs using simple natural language prompts.
• Application and infrastructure operations: Operators can chat with Duet AI in natural language across a number of services directly in the Google Cloud Console, to quickly retrieve “how-to” information about infrastructure configuration, deployment best practices, and expert recommendations on cost and performance optimization.
• Data Analytics: Duet AI in BigQuery provides contextual assistance for writing SQL queries as well as Python code, generates full functions and code blocks, auto-suggests code completions, and explains SQL statements in natural language, and can generate recommendations based on your schema and metadata.
• Accelerating and modernizing databases: Duet AI in Cloud Spanner, AlloyDB and Cloud SQL, helps generate code to structure, modify, or query data using natural language.
• Security Operations: Duet AI is also coming to security products including Chronicle Security Operations, Mandiant Threat Intelligence, and Security Command Center, which can empower security professionals to more efficiently prevent threats, reduce toil in security workflows, and uplevel security talent.

Kurian and NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang at Google Cloud Next 2023. (Image – Google)

Duet AI in Workspace

In Google Workspace, Duet AI has already seen users using the tool as a powerful collaboration partner. As the world’s most popular productivity tool, with over 3 billion users and 10 million paying customers, the enhancements announced at Google Cloud Next on Duet AI in Workspace will enable greater productivity for users.

Enhancements for Duet AI in Google Meet will see the tool taking notes during video calls, sending meeting summaries, and even translating captions into 18 languages automatically , including Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Indonesian, Thai, and Vietnamese. Duet AI in Meet is also enabling clearer visual and audio through studio look, studio lighting and studio sound.

For Google Chat, users can chat directly with Duet AI to ask questions about content, get a summary of documents shared in a space and even catch up on missed conversations. Google has also refreshed the user interface and enhanced search to allow users to stay on top of conversations.

A demo of Duet AI in Google Workspace (Source – Google)

Vertex AI

One of Google Cloud’s gems, Vertex AI continues to be a game-changer in the industry, especially with generative AI now integrated into it. At Google Cloud Next, a variety of announcements were made that expanded Vertex AI’s capabilities.

Firstly, new models in Model Garden further Google Cloud’s ability to provide choice with a diverse and open ecosystem. The new additions include Llama 2 and Code Llama from Meta, along with the Technology Innovation Institute’s Falcon LLM.

Model Garden’s variety lets enterprises match models to their needs, and when customers want full transparency into a model’s weights and artifacts, for instance for compliance and auditing support purposes, open-source options such as Llama 2 and Falcon offer a great choice.

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“We know that an organization’s data is one of the most important factors for model performance, which is why we’ve made it easy to tune these models. In fact, we’re the only cloud provider that supports Llama 2 with both adapter tuning and Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). This allows organizations to tune Llama 2 with their own enterprise data while continuing to maintain full control and ownership of their data,” said Google.

Tweet by Co-Founder and CEO of Google Deep Mind on SynthID

Secondly, Vertex AI sees updates to several first-party foundation models, bringing the deep expertise of Google DeepMind to customers. This includes upgrades to PaLM with higher quality outputs, a 32,000-token context window that analyzes much larger documents, grounding capabilities for enterprise data, and its availability in 38 languages, including Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Indonesian, Thai, and Vietnamese. Codey, Google Cloud’s model for code generation and chat, now offers better performance, and Imagen, our model for image generation, features improved image quality. Google Cloud is also planning to host its PaLM for Text and Chat models, as well as its Codey model, in its Singapore cloud region later this year.

Taking a step forward towards copyright, Google Cloud also announced a new digital watermarking functionality for Imagen powered by Google DeepMind’s SynthID. The experimental availability of digital watermarking on Vertex AI makes Google Cloud the first hyperscale cloud provider to enable the creation of invisible and tamper-resistant watermarks in AI-generated images.

SynthID is a state-of-the-art technology that embeds the digital watermark directly into the image of pixels, making it invisible to the human eye, and very difficult to tamper with, without damaging the image.

Analytics and database

For analytics and databases, Google Cloud announced enhancements to the following tools:

BigQuery Studio – A single interface for data engineering, analytics, and predictive analysis, BigQuery Studio helps increase efficiency for data teams.

AlloyDB AI – An integral part of AlloyDB, the PostgreSQL-compatible database service,  AlloyDB AI offers an integrated set of capabilities for easily building GenAI apps, including high-performance and vector queries.

New partners at Google Cloud Next

Google Cloud Next also saw the announcement of New Data Cloud Partners. The partners, which include Confluent, DataRobot, Dataiku, Datastax, Elastic, MongoDB, Neo4j, Redis, SingleStore, and Starburst, are all launching new capabilities to help customers accelerate and enhance generative AI development with data.

“We are in an entirely new era of digital transformation, fueled by GenAI. This technology is already improving how businesses operate and how humans interact with one another. It’s changing the way doctors care for patients, the way people communicate, and even the way workers are kept safe on the job. And this is just the beginning,” concluded Kurian.

The post Here’s what went down at Google Cloud Next 2023   appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

For Google, Indonesia is a country with huge digital opportunities. The world’s fourth most populated country already has one of the biggest growths when it comes to e-commerce and digitalization. 

According to the e-Conomy SEA report, the Southeast Asian region could see growth up to US$360 billion by 2025 in e-commerce, food delivery and digital financial services. Indonesia is expected to be a big contributor to achieving this, especially with one in three Indonesians having access to the Internet. 

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At the recent Google Cloud Jakarta Summit 2023, the tech giant unveiled new solutions and resources available to organizations of all sizes in Indonesia to help them leverage the power of artificial intelligence (AI) quickly, securely, and responsibly. AI is already seeing increased adoption globally, especially with recent innovations. 

Upskilling talent for the AI economy

Businesses around the world continue to invest heavily in AI technology, with the hopes that it can enhance their productivity and efficiency. In Southeast Asia, organizations are hoping AI can also help solve the skills shortage problem in some areas. However, investing in AI solutions alone is not enough. Businesses need to ensure there is a workforce that is skilled and trained in working with AI.

With the rise of AI for businesses — specifically generative AI like ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Bing — Google is making career paths in generative AI more accessible to individuals. Google Cloud is providing seven free new generative AI skills development courses available under its Cloud Skills Boost Program. At its core, the learning path helps to develop a solid understanding of the difference between generative AI and other types of AI, how to customize pre-trained generative AI models for use in applications, how to apply AI responsibly, and many more. 

After acquiring foundational skills in generative AI, learners can pursue other machine learning (ML) and data science learning paths or industry-recognized IT certifications through the Cloud Skills Boost platform. Thanks to the convenience of online education, Indonesians can now seize the opportunity to build and demonstrate their proficiency in cloud AI skills to prospective employers.

“By making new skilling courses, pre-trained models, developer-friendly tools, and startup support available in Indonesia, Google Cloud is reinforcing its commitment toward empowering organizations of all sizes to deploy generative AI with ease and speed while protecting their data, applications, and users,” says Megawaty Khie, Regional Director for Indonesia and Malaysia at Google Cloud in a press release. 

The Google for AI Startups Cloud Program has also been available for startups in Indonesia that use AI as their core technology to develop primary products or solutions. Covering cloud costs up to US$350,ooo over two years, the program aims to support Series A startups. For pre-seed AI-first startups, the program will provide up to US$2,000 in free cloud credits to help fund development of proof-of-concepts and showcase of products to prospective investors and customers.

(Source – Shutterstock)

What are some other reskilling initiatives in Indonesia? 

As a thriving mobile-first nation, Indonesia is among the fastest growing mobile markets globally. According to data.ai’s 2022 spotlight report, new app downloads in the country have surpassed 7.3 billion in 2021 — a 33% increase from pre-pandemic levels in 2019. 

To expand and fuel Indonesia’s digital economy, Google supports developers and entrepreneurs at all levels within the region through upskilling training, mentoring, online scholarships, and university partnerships. Since 2016, the initiatives have trained more than 65,000 Indonesians — from beginners to more advanced developers. 

Indonesia Android Kejar (IAK), for instance, provides courses on programming for the Android mobile platform. It helps aspiring programmers in Indonesia attain entry-level jobs as Android developers and nurtures the skills of intermediate and advanced-level developers. IAK supplements Udacity online training with offline, in-classroom study groups led by facilitators and designed to guide people through the process of building mobile applications.

On top of this, they are also investing in offline education at traditional learning institutions. Google has partnered with universities, such as Institut Teknologi Bandung and Universitas Telkom, to incorporate the Android Developer Fundamentals course into their final-year curricula. Currently, they have trained faculty at 80 Indonesian institutions who will teach these courses to thousands of students throughout the academic year.

Similarly, Google designed “Bangkit” to prepare students with in-demand skills and tech certifications. The curriculum has three interdisciplinary learning paths:  machine learning, mobile development, and cloud computing. This year, Bangkit is offered as a “Kampus Merdeka’s Study Independent Bersertifikat” program supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology of the Republic of Indonesia. 

Reskilling and upskilling courses in the region

Apart from Indonesia, Google has also announced several reskilling and upskilling courses and initiatives in the region. In Malaysia, Google launched a new digital training program in Malaysia last year. The Gemilang program offers flexible learning paths for all Malaysians including Google Career Certificates, enabling learners to develop their knowledge and acquire digital skills for high-demand jobs. In its mission to Advance Malaysia Together, Google has also reinforced its commitment to enable an equitable and inclusive digital economy by offering 31,000 scholarships through local partners, comprising education institutions, industry partners, and nonprofits.

Over in Singapore, Google upskilling courses like the Skills Ignition SG (SISG) program, which was launched in 2020 in collaboration with the Singaporean government, has seen more than 5,500 people acquire new skills and received certification. Google also revealed that, in support of the Digital for Life movement, they will be collaborating with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and the Media Literacy Council to train 50,000 parents and kids on online safety over the course of the next 12 months, starting by introducing the Be Internet Awesome (BIA) curriculum to primary schools.

The post Google Cloud unveils AI upskilling courses in Indonesia  appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Data security, privacy, and access have emerged as major challenges for many organizations in the rapidly evolving digital landscape. It’s predicted that several significant issues will confront companies in the near future. Companies must secure their sensitive information while ensuring accessibility to appropriate parties. This task adds another layer of complexity when balancing access with necessary privacy measures.

Furthermore, organizations must prepare for evolving cybersecurity threats, such as advanced persistent threats and ransomware attacks. Companies must establish comprehensive data management strategies incorporating advanced technologies and robust security practices to navigate these challenges successfully.

Tech Wire Asia had the opportunity to speak exclusively with Sanjay Poonen, CEO & President of Cohesity, about data security and protection capabilities. He also shed light on how Cohesity is helping customers with its AI & ML capabilities and integration with one of the ‘big 3’ cloud providers’ AI offerings.

Addressing data security challenges

Sanjay Poonen, CEO & President of Cohesity

Poonen likened challenges in data security and privacy to an iceberg scenario. The visible part represents primary data, actively collected and stored in databases, emails, or files. Over time, this data is backed up and becomes harder to access, much like an iceberg beneath the water. This burgeoning backup data presents two significant issues.

Firstly, cybercriminals have identified this secondary data as a lucrative target. Companies often find themselves compelled to pay the ransom if infiltrated since the compromised data is typically their only backup. This situation has led to a surge in ransomware attacks on backup data, shifting it from a mere storage concern to a prominent security issue.

Secondly, the nature of this backup data—compressed, deduplicated—makes applying analytics, business intelligence, and artificial intelligence challenging. This results in a sizable but underutilized treasure trove of information, presenting an obstacle to efficient data utilization.

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“We have identified these challenges and are uniquely addressing them by applying security and AI techniques, such as generative AI, to this secondary data. We believe we’re on the cusp of something big,” said Poonen.

Cohesity and Google Cloud: A powerful alliance

Cohesity recently announced an expanded collaboration with Google Cloud at the Cohesity Catalyst virtual conference, aiming to empower organizations with generative AI and data. They also introduced Cohesity Turing, a dynamic AI technology suite enhancing data security and management. This strengthened alliance with Google Cloud and Cohesity Turing allows organizations to manage their entire data spectrum through a secure, unified workflow across on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge environments.

Poonen envisages significant collaborative potential between AI-centric Google and startups like Cohesity, augmenting their partnership with Microsoft in OpenAI.

“Google’s strong reputation in the AI field, alongside the successes of Google Cloud, is mainly due to their expertise in AI. Therefore, we are adopting a customer-focused approach: if customers choose Google Cloud as their preferred vendor, we’re poised to work closely with them. The same applies if they choose Microsoft Azure or AWS, which is currently working on its general AI platform, Bedrock. Ultimately, our priority is customer choice,” Poonen explained.

Cohesity and Google Cloud have a longstanding collaboration providing customers with a robust enterprise-grade solution for application backup and recovery. Expanding on recent developments, Cohesity is further integrating its AI-ready platform, Cohesity Data Cloud, with premier cloud services such as Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.

This integration combines Cohesity’s data security and management prowess with Vertex AI, empowering customers to derive new insights from their already secured and managed data on Cohesity’s platform. It also enhances data search capabilities across vast quantities of data, enabling swift threat detection and response to specific queries.

Regarding Cohesity Turing, this launch encompasses an assortment of AI/ML technologies and abilities, integrated into Cohesity’s multi-cloud data platform and solutions. Cohesity plans to persistently refine the range of technologies offered by and powered through Cohesity Turing as new AI requirements surface, thus empowering customers to use AI in a secure and responsible manner.

Cohesity Turing is designed to facilitate organizations in leveraging the most recent AI capabilities to streamline operations, gain a deeper understanding of security threats, and extract more value from their data.

“Our primary focus in data security is on ransomware protection. While we aren’t as concentrated on the privacy use case, we certainly prioritize protecting the data. We can provide privacy controls for the data that companies store and govern. If you envision that large volume of data as the bottom of an iceberg, you’ll see that the more we can scan the data for malware or sensitive information, the better we can ensure its integrity ,” said Poonen.

By applying these techniques, the company can confirm the data’s cleanliness, similar to being in a “clean room.” The data is then isolated in a secure, immutable location, whether in an air-gapped environment, in the cloud, or on-premises.

The importance of the CISO and CTO collaboration

Given the challenges and bottlenecks Poonen mentioned, it’s evident that the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) role is more critical now than ever before. However, collaboration between CISOs and Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) is also essential. Typically, the focus on infrastructure falls under the purview of the CTO, while budget allocation often stems from the CISO.

While partnerships might succeed or fail, adopting an egoless perspective and understanding that the shared goal is safeguarding the company can lead to effective collaboration. “Regardless of who controls the budget, if the CISO can secure approval for a ransomware protection budget item, and this approval aids the implementation of a next-generation data management and security solution like Cohesity, it would be beneficial for both roles to work together,” Poonen emphasized.

Source – Shutterstock

Reflecting on the rapid evolution in data security, it’s clear that the responsibility lies with organizations, particularly the CISO, to anticipate future trends. Poonen offered valuable advice for such organizations to prepare for impending changes.

He stressed the importance of strengthening cybersecurity hygiene to shield against many attacks. This could entail implementing multi-factor authentication, endorsing routine password updates, defining segmentation and micro-segmentation policies to contain exposure, and adopting a privilege-based access system to establish varying authorization levels. Additionally, he advocated for the incorporation of a zero-trust approach.

“These are fundamental security principles that everyone in the organization should understand,” said Poonen. “It’s akin to attending driver’s school – each employee must be educated on these principles as they play a significant role in ensuring safety. It’s then crucial to enforce these policies in a way that might resemble traffic school. There are traffic lights and police for a reason, but within those confines, there’s still freedom – you can drive quickly on the freeway but slow down on congested streets.”

Poonen likens managing AI to taming fire: beneficial if controlled, destructive if misused. Advocating for ‘responsible AI’, he emphasizes the need for safeguarding measures to prevent misuse. Cohesity implements these AI guardrails, ensuring secure and responsible use while promoting productive data analysis.

Cohesity’s data security alliance: Bridging enterprise IT and security

Cohesity, prioritizing data security, expanded its unique Data Security Alliance with new members, including Netskope, ServiceNow, and Zscaler. Further, it introduced fresh integrations with cybersecurity leaders like CrowdStrike, ServiceNow, and updated its association with Tenable.

In November 2022, the alliance also comprised BigID, Cisco, CyberArk, Mandiant, Okta, PwC UK, Palo Alto Networks, Qualys, Securonix, and Splunk. This unique consortium bridges enterprise IT and security, fostering rapid threat detection, enhanced remediation, and improved cyber resilience.

An upcoming global study commissioned by Cohesity, featuring BigID and Tenable, highlights the demand for such alliances. In the survey, 87% of over 3,000 IT and security respondents concurred that integrated anti-ransomware solutions provided by data security and management, and cybersecurity companies are essential for combating ransomware threats.

What steps is Cohesity taking to stay ahead, and what can organizations in the APAC region expect from Cohesity?

Cohesity’s central strategy is to uphold an innovation rate that outpaces its competition. Although its team is smaller than many competing firms in the traditional data protection sector, Cohesity’s spirit of innovation has positioned it as a frontrunner. The goal is to innovate five to ten times faster than competitors.

“Despite being smaller in size, we’re the fastest-growing company in terms of market share growth, according to key analysts,” said Poonen. “We attribute this growth to our emphasis on innovation. We strive for recognition as a leader in vision and strategy, with our team aiming to outperform by a factor of three or four.”

This acknowledgement isn’t just internal; even IBM, a competitor, has recognized Cohesity’s innovative prowess. After evaluating all players in the space, IBM concluded that Cohesity has the best platform, deciding to exclusively OEM Cohesity, a decision made just two months ago in March.

Poonen is optimistic about its reputation in the field, stating, “Increasingly, customers and partners see us as a top product in the sector. We’re excited about the potential of our partnership with IBM in APJ. They have a much broader channel and a strong brand presence in Asia Pacific, Japan, Australia, Singapore, and many other countries where our distribution may not be as widespread. I’m eager to see how this partnership can broaden our market reach in APJ.”

The post Navigating the data security iceberg: An exclusive with Cohesity’s Sanjay Poonen appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

In fact, Gartner predicts that worldwide IT spending is projected to reach US4.6 trillion in 2023, a 5.5% increase from 2022 despite continued global economic turbulence. Specifically, the software segment is expected to see double-digit growth in 2023 as enterprises prioritize spending to capture competitive advantages.

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Another recent Gartner poll also showed that the hype generated by ChatGPT has led to increased investments in generative AI. Businesses are interested in looking at how this technology can bring a change to their organization despite the concerns of generative AI by regulators.

According to Sunil Potti, VP/GM for Google Cloud Security, generative AI is ideal for consumer apps and has mainstream value, unlike the cloud which has more value for enterprises. When business leaders see this value for consumers, they will be more excited to leverage it for their organizations. Unlike the cloud which has minimal consumer use cases, he believes the growing generative AI use cases for consumers will soon become mainstream for enterprises.

“Each of our daily lives is now impacted by Generative AI. The same tech will be more accelerated on the enterprise side. If they can taste the value directly, they will go to it faster. While we take a measured approach in generative AI, the more enterprise customers get a test of the experience on a personal side, they will be more convicted to use it on the enterprise side as well,” said Potti in a media briefing.

(Source – Google)

Enhancing cybersecurity with generative AI

Looking at enterprise use cases, the use of generative AI in cybersecurity is an area in which Potti expects to see greater value in adoption. Put simply, in cybersecurity, generative AI can enable businesses to take a more cost-effective approach towards cybersecurity, while still ensuring they have sufficient protections.

For Potti, enterprises are often challenged with the complexity and costs of having to deal with many cybersecurity solutions. Cybercriminals are already using open-source large language models (LLM) to target enterprises. As such, Potti hopes to give enterprises an edge in this.

“Instead of creating another interface or security product, we have taken the approach to build a platform powered by LLM. This enables anyone to build a security app on top of it. This model now comes with Sec-PaLM built in around the Google Cloud’s Security AI Workbench. It allows customers to directly leverage these capabilities for their security use cases,” commented Potti.

Google Cloud Security AI Workbench is an extensible platform powered by a specialized, security LLM or Sec-PaLM, which leverages Google’s visibility into the threat landscape and Mandiant’s frontline intelligence on vulnerabilities, malware, threat indicators, and more.

Google Cloud Security AI Workbench will power new offerings to uniquely address three top security challenges: threat overload, toilsome tools, and the talent gap. It will also feature partner plug-in integrations to bring threat intelligence, workflow, and other critical security functionality to customers, with Accenture being the first partner to utilize Security AI Workbench. Potti highlighted that a partner could choose to interact as a customer or a contributor.

“The platform will also let customers make their private data available to the platform at inference time; ensuring we honor all our data privacy commitments to customers. Because Security AI Workbench is built on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI infrastructure, customers control their data with enterprise-grade capabilities such as data isolation, data protection, sovereignty, and compliance support,” explained Potti in a blog post.

Vertex AI is Google Cloud’s machine learning platform for training and deploying ML models and AI applications. For enterprises, generative AI support in Vertex AI offers the simplest way for data science teams to take advantage of foundation models like PaLM, in a way that provides them with the most choice and control, including the ability to:

• Choose the use case they want to solve. Developers can now easily access PaLM API on Vertex AI to immediately address use cases such as content generation, chat, summarization, classification, and more.
• Choose from Google’s latest foundation models. Options will include models invented by Google Research and DeepMind, and support for a variety of data formats, including text, image, video, code, and audio.
• Choose from a variety of models. Over time, Vertex AI will support open-source and third-party models. With the widest variety of model types and sizes available in one place, Vertex AI gives customers the flexibility to use the best resource for their business needs.
• Choose how to tune, customize, and optimize prompts. Use business data to increase the relevance of foundation model output and maintain control over costs, while ensuring data sovereignty and privacy.
• Choose how to engage with models. Whether via notebooks, APIs, or interactive prompts, a variety of tools lets developers, data scientists, and data engineers all contribute to building gen apps and customized models.

LLM threats are going to be more advanced than the current technique patterns used by cybercriminals. For example, in phishing emails, cybercriminals can have a bot to prey on victims with a more personalized approach through generative AI. This makes it harder for a consumer to distinguish between a real person and a bot.

For Potti, just as how Google protects the cloud, they can bring the same experience to AI.

“We have only just begun to realize the power of applying generative AI to security, and we look forward to continuing to leverage this expertise for our customers and drive advancements across the security community,” concluded Potti.

The post Google has the perfect plan for generative AI in cybersecurity appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

“The current business environment demands rapid, data-driven decision-making and operations,” said Jeremiah Stone, CTO at SnapLogic. “The combination of Google Cloud and SnapLogic gives business and technology teams the power to thrive through focused, scalable innovation and fact-based decision making.”

Google Cloud Marketplace

Google Cloud Marketplace lets users quickly deploy functional software packages that run on Google Cloud. Customers can easily start up a familiar software package with services like Google Cloud’s Compute Engine or Cloud Storage, with no manual configuration required.

SnapLogic provides both line-of-business and IT teams with the ability to accelerate and automate the process of moving data in and out of Google Cloud, helping surface critical business insights that improve decision-making. With SnapLogic, users are also empowered to create custom integrations that enable automated business processes. Google Snap Packs make it easy to create and manage Google Cloud integration pipelines through low-code/no-code tools and artificial intelligence (AI) – assisted recommendation logic.

Jeremiah Stone, SnapLogic CTO.

“With SnapLogic and Google Cloud, we’ve been able to empower our customers with the real-time access to data that they need to inform critical business functions,” added Ryan Gross, Partner Data & Insights at Credera. “We can easily and quickly move data as needed from the applications and other sources it may reside into databases for accelerated analysis.”

SnapLogic is available on Google Cloud Marketplace here.

Google Cloud Ready – AlloyDB Designation

SnapLogic also announced that it has successfully achieved a Google Cloud Ready – AlloyDB designation for AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, Google Cloud’s newest fully managed PostgreSQL- compatible database service for most demanding enterprise database workloads.

“The Cloud Ready – AlloyDB designation ensures that customers can quickly and effectively integrate SnapLogic’s widely-adopted platform and data movement capabilities with the AlloyDB database service, helping them more easily bring data into AlloyDB for superior performance, scale, and availability,” said Ritika Suri, Director, Technology Partnerships at Google Cloud.

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Google Cloud Ready – AlloyDB is a new designation for the solutions of Google Cloud’s technology partners that integrate with AlloyDB. These partners have closely collaborated with Google Cloud to add support for AlloyDB into their solutions and tune their existing functionality for optimal outcomes. This designation recognizes the partner solutions that have met a core set of functional requirements and validated in collaboration with Google Cloud engineering teams.

By earning this designation, SnapLogic has proven its products meet a core set of functional and interoperability requirements when integrating with AlloyDB and refined documentation for ease of onboarding by mutual customers. This designation enables customers to discover and have confidence that the SnapLogic products they use today work well with AlloyDB, or save time on evaluating them, if not already using. Being part of the program, SnapLogic gets more opportunities to collaborate closely with Google Cloud partner engineering and AlloyDB teams to develop joint roadmaps.

For more information about SnapLogic’s overall partnership with Google Cloud, please click here.

About SnapLogic

SnapLogic powers the automated enterprise. The company’s self-service, AI-powered integration platform helps organizations connect applications and data sources, automate common workflows and business processes, and deliver exceptional experiences for customers, partners, and employees. Thousands of enterprises around the world rely on the SnapLogic platform to integrate, automate, and transform their business. Learn more at snaplogic.com.

Connect with SnapLogic via our Blog, Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

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