The preview is available for its solutions Dataplex, Analytics Hub and Datastream.
Google Cloud, at its inaugural Data Cloud Summit, has announced three new solutions across its database and data analytics portfolio.

The company has announced the preview availability of its solutions Dataplex, Analytics Hub and Datastream.

Datastream is the tech giant’s new serverless Change Data Capture (CDC) and replication service.

It enables customers to replicate data streams in real-time, from Oracle and MySQL databases to Google Cloud services such as BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Google Cloud Storage, and Cloud Spanner.

“This solution allows businesses to power real-time analytics, database replication, and event-driven architectures,” Google said.

Analytics Hub is a new capability that will enable companies to create, curate, and manage analytics exchanges securely and in real-time. The solution will allow customers to share data and insights, including dynamic dashboards and machine learning models inside and outside their organisation, securely. In addition, Analytics Hub enables organisations to combine enterprise datasets with unique Google, commercial, industry and public data, Google said. The preview for Analytics Hub will be launched soon.

Available in preview, “Dataplex is an intelligent data fabric which provides an integrated analytics experience.”

It will bring together Google Cloud capabilities and open-source to enable customers to rapidly curate, secure, integrate, and analyse their data at scale.

It has built-in data intelligence that leverages Google’s Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning capabilities.

“Data must be thought of as an ability that integrates all aspects of working with it. Every industry is accelerating their shift of being digital-first as they recognize data is the essential ingredient for value creation and the key to advancing their digital transformation,” said Gerrit Kazmaier, Vice President and General Manager, Databases, Data Analytics and Looker, Google Cloud.

“At Google Cloud, we’re committed to helping customers build the most powerful data cloud solution to unlock value and actionable, real-time insights, needed to future-proof their business,” added Kazmaier.

Businesses are at a pivotal moment in time. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that global GDP shrank by 4.4% in 2020, and contraction in the most advanced economies is estimated to be 5.8%. Today, however, vaccine availability and distribution brings us the brightest glimmer of hope yet that slowing the devastation of the virus may be a reality. More effectively addressing the health crisis also means economic recovery is becoming a stronger possibility – if businesses can lean into change and embrace new ways of working.

To enable this recovery, organisations across every industry are accelerating their shift to digital solutions. Turning to cloud technology promises to solve their most challenging problems and enable opportunities amidst changing customer demands and regulatory frameworks. In fact, McKinsey estimates the pandemic has fueled a three- to four-year acceleration of companies adopting digital technologies to support their customer and supply chain interactions. The most innovative companies need to rethink how employees collaborate and how they can digitise customer experiences.

Here are three key ways in which companies can use technology to their advantage and fuel their own recovery.

Businesses need to lower their costs and replatform for the future
Macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainties create unknowns for every business. As a result, CEOs and CFOs are naturally seeking to optimise areas of their organisations.

Buying, maintaining and upgrading the technology infrastructure needed to run a business is not only difficult, but increasingly it is prohibitively expensive. Fixed IT systems require users to accurately predict their future needs, which now seem out-of-touch with our ever-changing business landscape. By contrast, a cloud server ensures that you only invest in the right amount, enabling users to flexibly adjust their consumption to meet fluctuating demands. This allows businesses to reinvest the remaining capital in creating customer experiences that will drive value creation. Gartner estimates that infrastructure-as-a-service is expected to grow 27.6% in 2021, precisely because of these cost savings and operational efficiencies – two of the greatest benefits of moving to the cloud.

Additionally, companies are realising the potential of a multicloud strategy. This set-up allows businesses to achieve an open, secure and agile infrastructure that can run in any environment, on any cloud. To grow and innovate within a company may mean moving entire on-premise IT infrastructure to the cloud, to transform digital operations.

Every business needs a digital front door
The remote nature of our lives—which is a permanent shift—is compelling businesses to use data and analytics to understand their customers better, overall enriching the customer experience.

Lockdowns have accelerated customer preferences for digital alternatives. Face-to-face customer service – a physical front door- is no longer enough to sustain a growing business. Today, customers also demand a ‘digital entrance’, and it’s transcending virtually every industry. In retail, companies are using AI and machine learning to deliver a better, more accurate online experience. Healthcare providers need secure, scalable platforms that support digital patient visits known as telemedicine.

Digital front doors are also changing the way governments work, like leveraging the cloud to distribute unemployment insurance online. With digitisation comes the opportunity for businesses to use data and analytics to make smarter decisions and get closer to their customers by creating more useful and productive experiences. By investing in innovative digital front doors now, companies will remain agile throughout the pandemic, whilst pivoting with changing customer expectations. Companies should celebrate the ease of digital experiences, which are personalisable and in no way mean a sacrifice on quality.

Companies need to embrace new ways of working
The future of work—and, for that matter, the definition of “workplace” itself—has transformed. While the pandemic as we know it will one day subside, our new way of working is here to stay, and it’s heightened the need to rethink how people get things done. We see the need for a new hybrid work environment, where companies and employees can use a digital workspace that allows them to collaborate on a flexible, cloud-native platform to generate new ideas and connect with each other. A successful transition into this new era of work is contingent on how successfully companies keep their people engaged, productive, and connected while reevaluating existing communication and collaboration tools.

No one can predict what the coming years will bring, but companies can control how they respond to uncertainty by investing in agile infrastructure that keeps people and connection at the heart of their operations. At this inflection point in the story of work, the ways in which each company responds to the challenges and opportunities it brings will define their relevance in the future. Those who lean into change, no matter how uncomfortable, and embrace the opportunity to fundamentally transform, will be stronger than before.

When DevOps emerged more than ten years ago, the main focus was to bridge the gaps between Dev and Ops activities and teams by introducing automation to the processes of building, testing and deployment of applications. What started as a loose collection of standard practices shared among high-functioning software engineering teams transformed into a modern statement of engineering culture and process: DevOps. At this point, security certainly played a role but wasn’t always a priority.

The rise of DevOps coincided with two other major shifts in the way software is built and deployed – the move to cloud and the growing reliance on open source. Together, these changes are powering digital transformation, enabling businesses to deliver value faster and remain competitive. These changes, though, also introduce additional complexities that make it increasingly challenging to secure digital assets.

As development teams continue to deliver more rapidly and more frequently, security teams are finding it difficult to keep up and often end up as being the bottleneck in the delivery pipeline. For this reason, bringing security into the DevOps fold from the outset – in other words, embracing a DevSecOps culture within a business – has become increasingly important.
An evolution, not a revolution
Embracing a DevSecOps process – that is, embedding security as an integral part of the development process – is a solution for all kinds of business where security is a bottleneck in this development process. Companies should think of DevSecOps as the natural continuation of DevOps, rather than a separate idea or concept; it is an evolutionary step, rather than a revolutionary one.

Embracing a DevSecOps culture enables development teams to secure what they build as they build it while creating more collaboration between development and security teams. This allows security teams to become a supporting function – offering their expertise to increase developer autonomy while also providing the oversight with the business needs.

The practicalities of implementation
Nailing DevSecOps won’t happen overnight. However, being aware of the need for it is already a step in the right direction for businesses. The benefits of DevSecOps are broad-ranging, but key advantages include:

Improved security posture: Security is a feature from the design phase onwards. A shared responsibility model ensures security is tightly integrated — from building and deploying code, to securing production workloads. Teams work collaboratively to share security knowledge and tooling gives faster feedback.
Reduced costs and time: Identifying vulnerabilities and bugs before deploying results in an exponential reduction in risk and operational cost. The time of secure software delivery is also reduced by eliminating the need to retrofit security controls post-development.
Enabling more reliable delivery: Greater trust in the security of developed software and embracing new technologies enables more reliable delivery, which ultimately means enhanced revenue growth and expanded business offerings.
Breaking it down: the three pillars
As businesses increasingly understand the importance of embracing a DevSecOps culture and the benefits it will bring, there are three pillars they should consider when moving towards implementation: people, process and technology. DevSecOps principles build on these three intersecting parts, by eliminating silos and creating a collective focus.

People: empowering the team
A modern security culture and mechanisms that work for, rather than against, people are crucial to making security work. Moving to DevSecOps starts by challenging the way traditional security teams integrate with the wider business. Strong links between development, security, and operations teams ensure earlier feedback on the quality of the code, software or application from a security point of view, and in turn, reduces the costs of implementing fixes.

Traditionally, development was responsible for fast delivery, security was responsible for application security, and operations were responsible for stability. DevSecOps removes these silos and unites all three roles in a common goal of rapidly delivering secure and stable software.

Process: supporting the new DevSecOps culture
Embracing a DevSecOps culture requires processes in place to ensure smooth adoption. This includes breaking down the barriers of policies and workflows coming from the top that have traditionally got in the way, and instead encouraging shared-responsibility.

When shifting to DevSecOps, the right balance between automated gating and manual gating must be found. Traditional security strategies involved setting key milestones at which security activities occurred and not allowing the process to progress past that milestone until an acceptable result was achieved. In some organizations with particularly mature models, operations implemented similar gates before software could be deployed. However, this kind of gating model creates lengthy feedback loops that slow software delivery and ultimately reinforce silo-based thinking. Whereas the key to DevSecOps is creating faster feedback loops.

Mutual accountability is a concept that must be embraced, as a replacement to gating, and supported by subsequent process changes. Development, security, and operations personnel should be working together to ensure all the business objectives – leading to the creation of fast, secure, and stable software – are achieved. A good place for these collaborative teams to start is with threat modelling to identify the security threats, the weaknesses that allow the threats to be exploited, and then identifying compensating controls that can be implemented to mitigate threats.

Processes by which security and operational best practices are implemented throughout the delivery pipeline are crucial in establishing this collaboration and accountability.

Technology: paving a path to success
Of course, putting the processes outlined above in place requires the support of proper technologies. While people and processes work together to ensure the adoption of this new DevSecOps culture, it can fall apart if the underlying technology doesn’t accommodate the changes.

Often, when people think about DevSecOps technologies, they get caught up in the automation of delivery processes such as builds, promotions, and deployments. But automation isn’t always the correct answer. Organizations need to look at their technology and automate when necessary and capable, streamline where possible, and eliminate technology where it’s not practical or it is redundant. In some cases, where automating around the bottleneck is making it costly, it may be necessary to overhaul the process completely. It is necessary to listen to other teams in the business and offer user-proof services.

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When choosing a technology platform, it’s important to select one that places the needs and requirements of developers at the centre of its solutions. Platforms with a developer-first approach are able to integrate security across the pipeline, helping multiple different stakeholders such as development, security and operations teams to get a holistic view to be able to come together and embed a mutual DevSecOps mindset.