Hi, I'm Jean Tunis coming to you from sunny Florida,
and this is GCP This Month for November, 2022.
Coming up in this episode,
we're talking about GCP product previews for monitoring and the marketplace,
BigQuery and Kubernetes features in GA and new GCP
offerings to protect government and entity organizations,
all that and more on GCP This Month, right now.
When you are looking to add software to your GCP projects,
you might be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of options you have in Google
Cloud Marketplace. In fact,
there are over 4,500 products in there.
How do you make sure that only the products your organization needs at the
supported version are added to your projects? Well, this month,
Google Cloud has announced that they're making Private Marketplace available
for preview.
This feature allows administrators to create a customized version of
Google Cloud marketplace that includes only the marketplace products your
organization needs and wants people to have access to. With Private Marketplace,
you are able to enforce, for example,
an organizational standard for monitoring products.
Speaking of monitoring products,
Google Cloud has announced the preview of customizable monitoring
dashboards for Cloud Storage. Basically,
this is an integration with cloud monitoring that lets you view and edit
out of the box dashboards to get insights into how your
Cloud Storage buckets are performing. But you access the charts and dashboards
from within Cloud Storage itself,
where you can see the storage metrics and logs that can help you troubleshoot
issues with your buckets more quickly. Now,
let's talk about the government.
According to a malware trend report from Google's VirusTotal,
cybersecurity attacks against government domains are among the top group of
targeted domains. Because they're such high targets,
governments need to have plans to continue their operations even during
an attack. And in the United States,
government agencies are expected to have a continuity of operations plan
or coup ready to go. To help with this,
Google Public Sector has introduced a new cloud offering to help governments
keep working in case of an attack. With this offering,
agencies can continue working using Google Workspace to maintain communications
with colleagues and their customers. Okay, sticking with security attacks,
this next story involves searches and investigations for
suspicious activity. Last month at Google Cloud Next,
Google Cloud introduced chronicle security operations,
which is a product that helps cybersecurity professionals detect, investigate,
and respond to security threats in ways that are similar to the speed and
scale that Google does for its own infrastructure. Well,
this month Google Cloud announced the GA of a newer and better
way in chronicle security operations to investigate potential threats found
in your organization's structured data.
Among other things you can access save searches and tap queries that
yielded results in past investigations for faster threat analysis.
According to Google Cloud, the mission is to expedite the quote,
time to aha. Okay,
let's finish up these quick bites with the roundup of some more products now in
GA. In the last month,
Google has announced a number of products that came out of preview and
into GA. They're: search indexes and functions in BigQuery,
GKE Gateway Controller,
Data Exploration Workbench in Dataplex, and advisory notifications.
Now, there's no blog posts for advisory notifications,
so I included a link in the description to its documentation page.
So take a look at that,
along with links to learn more about the other new features.
Late last month,
Google Cloud announced the introduction of Blockchain Node Engine.
This is a node hosting service to help web three companies deploy their
products faster.
Blockchain is changing a lot about how data is moved
and stored on the internet.
Data exchange on a blockchain is stored in a node that forms a
peer-to-peer relationship with other nodes.
They sync this data with each other so that no one node has all of
the information. Now,
maintaining how nodes exchange data and their operation is usually the job
of the developers creating products for their blockchain platform of choice.
But this can be a lot of work to ensure that these node functions are happening
properly and most importantly,
securely see security is the first priority of the blockchain.
As you've seen in the quick bite,
I talked about Google Cloud products focused on security in the past month or
so, but it's not just been the past month. Early this year in January,
Google Cloud created a dedicated team called the Digital Assets Team
to support their blockchain developers and customers.
Creating the Blockchain Node Engine is another way to continue this support.
With this product,
developers can deploy their nodes onto the blockchain with a single
operation. And to start,
Google Cloud includes support only for secure access of the Ethereum
blockchain. But earlier this month,
Google Cloud announced on Twitter that it's now running a
block-producing Solana validator to participate in and validate
the network.
This is a step they're taking so they can support the Solana Blockchain
for Blockchain Node Engine in 2023. Now,
I'm particularly interested in this because Google seems to have made a big
effort this year to beef up and show its security excellence in
their announcement for Chronicle security operations I talked about before.
Google Cloud has made a commitment to make it easier for others to
benefit from their expertise by quote,
democratizing security operations. And last month,
Google introduced a YouTube series called Hacking Google,
where they highlight how they have stopped and continue to stop
attacks against their infrastructure.
Now securing crypto assets and the blockchain took a little bit of
a hit this month at the cryptocurrency exchange.
FTX collapsed seemingly in a few days,
and stories of unauthorized access to FTX doesn't help the situation.
According to Tom Robinson,
co-founder and chief scientist at Blockchain Analytic Company,
elliptic confidence in crypto could take a long time to
recover,
but with Google Cloud showing that it has this security expertise,
the blockchain node engine could be used as a way to help better secure crypto
and the blockchain,
especially as more blockchain platforms get supported. Well,
that's it for this episode of GCP This Month.
Join us next month for more news updates and announcements.
Don't forget to subscribe to the channel if you haven't not already, to get notified of future episodes.
Until then, I'm Jean Tunis. Take care.