Category Archives: Google for Work Blog

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The Spanish Data Protection Authority (AEPD) confirms compliance of Google Cloud commitments for international data flows

Millions of organizations use Google Cloud services every day, relying on Google to provide world-class privacy and security protections. Data protection is central to our mission, and we're always looking at ways to facilitate our customers’ compliance journey.

Today we’re pleased to announce that the Spanish Data Protection Agency (“Agencia Española de Protección de Datos” or “AEPD”) has issued a decision confirming that the guarantees established by the contractual commitments provided by Google for the international transfers of data to U.S. connected to its G Suite and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services are adequate. Therefore, the international transfers to U.S. under such contractual commitments are deemed authorized by the AEPD provided the conditions established by the AEPD’s decision are met.

This authorization benefits all of our G Suite and GCP customers in Spain, who don’t need to pursue it individually. Rather, customers need to opt in to the relevant model contract clauses (via the online processes described on our Help Centers for G Suite and GCP services, respectively) and notify their relevant transfer to the AEPD’s registry. For more details, please see the AEPD’s decision.

The EU’s Data Protection Authorities had already confirmed earlier this year that Google Cloud services’ contractual commitments fully meet the requirements to legally frame transfers of data from the EU to the rest of the world in accordance with the EU Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC.

This authorization is an important milestone for Google and its Spanish customers, as it reaffirms that the legal protections underpinning G Suite and GCP international data flows meet European and Spanish regulatory requirements. Furthermore, our customers can count on the fact that Google is committed to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) across G Suite and Google Cloud Platform services.

What does this mean for our customers in the Spanish jurisdiction?

G Suite and GCP customers may benefit from a simplified process with regard to international data transfers via our services provided the conditions established by the AEPD’s decision are met.

What are the key aspects of the authorization from the Spanish data protection authority?

Customers in the Spanish jurisdiction can benefit from the authorization as long as the international transfer of personal data remains in the scope of the authorization. You can read the full authorization here. Customers will still be required to notify the AEPD and may need to comply with additional legal requirements. Please consult a lawyer to obtain legal advice specifically applicable to your business circumstances.

How can customers make use of Google’s authorization?

Customers must sign a contract. The contractual arrangements shall include the Data Processing Amendment (DPA) for G Suite / Data Processing and Security Terms (DPST) for GCP and the EU Model Contractual Clauses (MCCs). Our customers can enter into the applicable relevant model contract clauses via the online processes described here for G Suite services and here for GCP services.

Source: Google Cloud

Schlumberger chooses GCP to deliver new oil and gas technology platform

Google Cloud has a simple but steadfast mission: Give companies technology for new and better ways to serve their customers. We handle the network, computing and security chores; you use our software-defined infrastructure, global databases and artificial intelligence to grow your business with speed and at scale.

A great example of this work is our collaboration with Schlumberger, which has selected Google Cloud as its strategic provider for its clients’ digital journey to the cloud.

For over 90 years, Schlumberger has worked with clients in the oil and gas industry. In this work, Schlumberger generates and uses large amounts of data to safely and efficiently manage hydrocarbon exploration and production. Schlumberger has developed a unique software environment that runs on GCP called DELFI*, a cognitive energy and production (E&P) environment at the SIS Global Forum, which spans from exploration to production. Customers can combine DELFI with their own proprietary data and science for new insights and faster results.

Today at the Schlumberger customer event SIS Global Forum, I talked about the new ways Google Cloud and Schlumberger are working together. This unique, multi-year collaboration encompasses a range of technologies:

Big data: Schlumberger launched the DELFI cognitive E&P environment and the deployment of an E&P Data Lake based on Google BigQuery, Cloud Spanner and Cloud Datastore with more than 100 million data items comprised of over 30TB of petrotechnical data.
Software platforms: Schlumberger announced the launch of its petrotechnical software platforms such as Petrel* E&P and INTERSECT* running on Google Cloud Platform and integrated into DELFI
High performance computing: Since announcing our relationship at Google Cloud Next, we’ve worked together to optimize Schlumberger Omega* geophysical data processing platform to run at a scale not possible in traditional data center environments. Using Google Cloud NVIDIA GPUs and Custom Machine Types, Schlumberger has deployed compute capacity of over 35 petaflops and 10PB of storage on GCP.
Artificial intelligence: Schlumberger leverages TensorFlow for complex petrotechnical interpretation of seismic and wellbore data, as well as automation of well-log quality control and 3D seismic interpretation.
Extensibility: Schlumberger adopted the Apigee API management platform to provide openness and extensibility for its clients and for partners to add their own intellectual property and workflows in DELFI

“To improve productivity and performance, DELFI enables our customers to take advantage of our E&P domain science and knowledge, while at the same time fully using disruptive digital technologies from Google Cloud,” said Ashok Belani, Executive VP of Technology, Schlumberger “This approach ensures that all data is considered when making critical decisions.”

By running on GCP, Schlumberger’s customers can supercharge their applications, whether it’s training machine learning models on our infrastructure, or easier software development and deployment via Kubernetes and containers. We’re also building upon new collaborations with other companies like Nutanix to give Schlumberger the flexibility to run its applications wherever they need to be—on-premises and in the cloud.

Our collaboration with Schlumberger is just the beginning. We’re thrilled the team has chosen Google Cloud to help deliver security, accessibility and innovation through their next generation energy exploration and production technology.

*Mark of Schlumberger

Source: Google Cloud

Schlumberger chooses GCP to deliver new oil and gas technology platform

A great example of this work is our collaboration with Schlumberger, which has selected Google Cloud as its strategic provider for its clients’ digital journey to the cloud.

Big data: Schlumberger launched the DELFI cognitive E&P environment and the deployment of an E&P Data Lake based on Google BigQuery, Cloud Spanner and Cloud Datastore with more than 100 million data items comprised of over 30TB of petrotechnical data.
Software platforms: Schlumberger announced the launch of its petrotechnical software platforms such as Petrel* E&P and INTERSECT* running on Google Cloud Platform and integrated into DELFI
High performance computing: Since announcing our relationship at Google Cloud Next, we’ve worked together to optimize Schlumberger Omega* geophysical data processing platform to run at a scale not possible in traditional data center environments. Using Google Cloud NVIDIA GPUs and Custom Machine Types, Schlumberger has deployed compute capacity of over 35 petaflops and 10PB of storage on GCP.
Artificial intelligence: Schlumberger leverages TensorFlow for complex petrotechnical interpretation of seismic and wellbore data, as well as automation of well-log quality control and 3D seismic interpretation.
Extensibility: Schlumberger adopted the Apigee API management platform to provide openness and extensibility for its clients and for partners to add their own intellectual property and workflows in DELFI

*Mark of Schlumberger

Source: Google Cloud

Box: Bringing image recognition and OCR to cloud content management

Editor’s note: In this guest editorial by Box’s Senior Director of Product Management, Ben Kus tells us how they used Google Cloud Vision to add a new level of image recognition to Box.

Images are the second most common and fastest growing type of file stored in Box. Trust us: that’s a lot of images.

Ranging from marketing assets to product photos to completed forms captured on a mobile device, these images are relevant to business processes and contain a ton of critical information. And yet, despite the wealth of value in these files, the methods that organizations use to identify, classify and tag images are still mostly manual.

Personal services like Google Photos, on the other hand, have gone far beyond simply storing images. These services intelligently organize photos, making them easier to discover. They also automatically recognize images, producing a list of relevant photos when users search for specific keywords. As we looked at this technology, we thought, "Why can't we bring it to the enterprise?"

The idea was simple: find a way to help our customers get more value from the images they store in Box. We wanted to make image files as easy to find and search through as text documents. We needed the technology to provide high-quality image labeling, be cost-effective and scale to the massive amount of image files stored in Box. We also needed it to handle thousands of image uploads per second and had to ensure that users actually found the image recognition useful. But we didn't want to build a team of machine learning experts to develop yet another image analysis technology—that just wasn't the best use of our resources.

That's where Google Cloud Vision came in. The image analysis results were high-quality, the pay-as-you-go pricing model enabled us to get something to market quickly without an upfront cost (aside from engineering resources), and we trusted that the service backed by Google expertise could seamlessly scale to support our needs. And, since many of the image files in Box contain text—such as licenses, forms and contracts—Cloud Vision’s optical character recognition (OCR) was a huge bonus. It could even recognize handwriting!

Using the Google Cloud Vision was straightforward. The API accepts an image file, analyzes the image's content and extracts any printed words, and then returns labels and recognized characters in a JSON response. Google Cloud Vision classifies the image into categories based on similar images, analyzes the content based on the type of analysis provided in the developer's request, and returns the results and a score of confidence in its analysis.

To securely communicate with Google Cloud Vision, we used the Google API Client Library for Java to establish an HTTPS connection via our proxy server. The simplest way to do this is to modify the JVM's proxy settings (i.e., https.proxyHost and https.proxyPort) and use Java's Authenticator class to provide credentials to the proxy. The downside of this approach is that it affects all of your outgoing connections, which may be undesirable (i.e., if you want other connections to not use the proxy). For this reason, we chose to use the ApacheHttpTransport class instead. It can be configured to use a proxy server only for the connections that it creates. For more information, see this post.

To access Google Cloud Vision, you need credentials—either an API key or a service account. Regardless of which credentials you use, you'll want to keep them secret, so that no one else can use your account (and your money!). For example, do not store your credentials directly in your code or your source tree, do control access to them, do encrypt them at rest, and do cycle them periodically.

So, in order to bring these powerful capabilities to Box, we needed a set of images to send to the API and a destination for the results returned by the API. Now, when an image is uploaded to a folder in Box with the feature enabled—either via the web application or the API—the image is automatically labeled and text is automatically recognized and tagged using metadata. Plus, these metadata and representation values are then indexed for search, which means users can use our web application, a partner integration or even a custom application built on the Box Platform to search for keywords that might be found in their image content. And the search results will appear almost instantly based on the Google Cloud Vision’s analysis. Developers can also request the metadata on the image file via the Box API to use elsewhere in an application.

As you can imagine, the ability to automatically classify and label images provides dozens of powerful use cases for Box customers. In our beta, we're working with companies across a number of industries:

A retail customer is using image recognition in Box to optimize digital asset management of product photos. With automatic object detection and metadata labels, they can cut out manual tagging and organization of critical images that are central to multi-channel processes.

A major media company is using image recognition in Box to automatically tag massive amounts of inbound photos from freelance photographers around the globe. Previously, there was no way they could preview and tag every single image. Now they can automatically analyze more images than ever before, and unlock new ways to derive value from that content.

A global real estate firm is leveraging optical character recognition in Box to digitize workflows for paper-based leases and agreements, allowing their employees to skip a manual tagging process while classifying sensitive assets more quickly.

We're excited to continue experimenting with GCP's APIs to help our customers get more out of their content in Box. You can learn more about this from our initial announcement.

Source: Google Cloud

Driving the digital transformation of “sending” with Google technologies

Editor's Note: Today we hear from Pitney Bowes, a global provider of innovative shipping solutions for businesses of all sizes. Learn how this established company used Android, Apigee, G Suite and Orbitera to create new cloud-based solutions, add flexibility and intelligence to sending devices and develop an app store that better serves their clients.

At Pitney Bowes, we’re always looking for new ways to transform the shipping and mailing industries. That’s been true from our first postage meter in 1920 to our digitally connected SendPro C-Series all-in-one office solution today. And with the help of Google, we’re delivering even more ways for our customers to reduce the complexity and cost of shipping, mailing, and global fulfillment.

Google, through its Android, Apigee, G Suite and Orbitera teams and technologies, has been foundational to the digital transformation of Pitney Bowes and the new capabilities we can now deliver to customers. It’s been an incredible and exciting journey for us, with many learnings along the way.

Before we could help our clients transform their businesses, we first needed to digitally transform our own. We began by reviewing our assets, such as our multicarrier shipping capabilities, data quality, location intelligence and mapping software. How could we securely and efficiently make these solutions available on open platforms? Could we combine them with features from our technology partners to create new solutions? What would be the best approach to modernize our offerings with our existing physical and digital solutions, without disrupting the customer experience?

One of the ways we answered those questions was by creating the Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud, based in part on Google’s Apigee API management platform. The Apigee platform and team helped us create new cloud-based solutions based on our assets and connect our new cloud solutions to our enterprise business systems such as billing.

Today, we have 160 public APIs delivered from the Commerce Cloud in the areas of location intelligence, shipping, global ecommerce and payments. Apigee became the gateway that shares these capabilities with developers and technology partners in a developer-friendly way, while also helping to protect our new open developer environment from cyber threats. In addition, Pitney Bowes uses Apigee to grant internal developers access to more than 400 internal APIs.

Our use of Android has modernized our physical sending devices and made them more flexible, user friendly and intelligent. The community of developers that can now create new applications and services for our sending devices has expanded from a handful to hundreds of Pitney Bowes developers—and millions of industry developers as well.

We, our clients, and our partners choose from millions of existing Android apps that we deliver to help our users be more productive. The speed with which we deliver new value to our clients has accelerated dramatically.

Furthermore, we’ll be leveraging Google Orbitera to provide an app store to our small businesses with access to innovative applications from Yext, Acquisio, G Suite and others. Providing our small business customers additional value from their relationship with Pitney Bowes will help them grow their businesses and operate more efficiently.

We're very excited by what the future holds. By collaborating with companies like Google, and leveraging modern cloud, APIs, IoT and mobile technologies, Pitney Bowes is transforming how we serve our clients and reinventing our business for our next century.

Source: Google Cloud

Driving the digital transformation of “sending” with Google technologies

Editor's Note: Today we hear from Roger Pilc, CIO at Pitney Bowes, a global provider of innovative shipping solutions for businesses of all sizes. Learn how this established company used Android, Apigee, G Suite and Orbitera to create new cloud-based solutions, add flexibility and intelligence to sending devices and develop an app store that better serves their clients.

Source: Google Cloud

7 ways admins can help secure accounts against phishing in G Suite

We work hard to help protect your company against phishing attacks—from using machine learning, to tailoring our detection algorithms, to building features to spot previously unseen attacks. While we block as many external attacks as we can, we continue to build and offer features designed to empower IT administrators to develop strong internal defenses against phishing.

Here are seven things we recommend admins do in G Suite to better protect employee data.

1. Enforce 2-step verification

Two-step verification (2SV) is one of the best ways to prevent someone from accessing your account, even if they steal your password. In G Suite, admins have the ability to enforce 2-step verification. 2SV can reduce the risk of successful phishing attacks by asking employees for additional proof of identity when they sign in. This can be in the form of phone prompts, voice calls, mobile app notifications and more.

G Suite also supports user-managed security keys—easy to use hardware authenticators. Admins can choose to enforce the use of security keys to help reduce the risk of stolen credentials being used to compromise an account. The key sends an encrypted signature and works only with authorized sites. Security keys can be deployed, monitored and managed directly from within the Admin console.

The Key to working smarter faster and safer

2. Deploy Password Alert extension for Chrome

The Password Alert chrome extension checks each page that users visit to see if that page is impersonating Google’s sign-in page and notifies admins if users enter their G Suite credentials anywhere other than the Google sign-in page.

Admins can enforce deployment of the Password Alert Chrome extension from the Google Admin Console (Device management > App Management > Password Alert)—just sign in and get started. You should check “Force installation" under both “User Settings” and “Public session settings.”

Admins can also enable password alert auditing, send email alerts and enforce a password change policy when G Suite credentials have been used on a non-trusted website such as a phishing site.

3. Allow only trusted apps to access your data

Take advantage of OAuth apps whitelisting to specify which apps can access your users’ G Suite data. With this setting, users can grant access to their G Suite apps’ data only to whitelisted apps. This prevents malicious apps from tricking users into accidentally granting unauthorized access. Apps can be whitelisted by admins in the Admin console under G Suite API Permissions.

4. Publish a DMARC policy for your organization

To help your business avoid damage to its reputation from phishing attacks and impersonators, G Suite follows the DMARC standard. DMARC empowers domain owners to decide how Gmail and other participating email providers handle unauthenticated emails coming from your domain. By defining a policy and turning on DKIM email signing, you can ensure that emails that claim to be from your organization, are actually from you.

5. Disable third-party email client access for those who don't need it

The Gmail clients (Android, iOS, Web) leverage Google Safe Browsing to incorporate anti-phishing security measures such as disabling suspicious links and attachments and displaying warnings to users to deter them from clicking on suspicious links.

By choosing to disable POP and IMAP, Google Sync and G Suite Sync for Microsoft Outlook, admins can ensure that a significant portion of G Suite users will only use Gmail clients and benefit from the built-in phishing protections that they provide. Additional measures include enabling OAuth apps whitelisting to block third-party clients as suggested earlier in the blog.

Note: all third-party email clients, including native mobile mail clients, will stop working if the measures outlined above are implemented.

6. Encourage your team to pay attention to external reply warnings

By default, Gmail clients (Android, Web) warn G Suite users if they’re responding to emails sent from outside their domain by someone they don’t regularly interact with, or from someone not in their contacts. This helps businesses protect against forged emails, from malicious actors or just plain old user-error like sending an email to the wrong contact. Educate your employees to look for these warnings and be careful before responding to unrecognized senders. Unintended external reply warnings are controlled from the Admin console control in the “Advanced Gmail” setting.

7. Enforce the use of Android work profiles

Work profiles allow you to separate your organization's apps from personal apps, keeping personal and corporate data separate. By using integrated device management within G Suite to enforce the use of work profiles, you can whitelist applications that access corporate data and block installation of apps from unknown sources. You now have complete control over which apps have access to your corporate data.

These steps can help you improve your organization’s security posture and become more resistant to phishing attacks. Learn more at gsuite.google.com/security or sign up for our security webinar on September 20, 2017 which features new security research from Forrester and a demonstration on how the cloud can help effectively combat cyber threats.

Source: Google Cloud

Analyze your business data with Explore in Google Sheets, use BigQuery too

A few months back, we announced a new way for you to analyze data in Google Sheets using machine learning. Instead of relying on lengthy formulas to crunch your numbers, now you can use Explore in Sheets to ask questions and quickly gather insights. Check it out.

Quicker data → problems solved

When you have easier access to data—and can figure out what it means quickly—you can solve problems for your business faster. You might use Explore in Sheets to analyze profit from last year, or look for trends in how your customers sign up for your company’s services. Explore in Sheets can help you track down this information, and more importantly, visualize it.

Getting started is easy. Just click the “Explore” button on the bottom right corner of your screen in Sheets. Type in a question about your data in the search box and Explore responds to your query. Here’s an example of how Sheets can build charts for you.

Syncing Sheets with BigQuery for deeper insights

For those of you who want to take data analysis one step further, you can sync Sheets with BigQuery—Google Cloud’s low cost data warehouse for analytics.

Compare publicly-available datasets in BigQuery, like U.S. Census Data or World Bank: Global Health, Nutrition, and Population data, to your company’s data in Sheets and gather information. For example, you can see how sales of your medical product compared with last year’s disease trends, or cross-reference average inflation prices in key markets of interest to your business.

Check out this post to see how you might query an example.

Source: Google Cloud

Analyze your business data with Explore in Google Sheets, use BigQuery too

Analyze easily with Explore in Sheets | The G Suite Show

Quicker data → problems solved

Syncing Sheets with BigQuery for deeper insights

For those of you who want to take data analysis one step further, you can sync Sheets with BigQuery—Google Cloud’s low cost data warehouse for analytics.

Check out this post to see how you might query an example.

Source: Google Cloud

New features in Jamboard to help you make the best of your jams

A few months have passed since we first released Jamboard—Google’s cloud-based, collaborative whiteboard. Since then, our engineering and product teams have been developing new features to make your jam sessions even better.

For those of you new to Jamboard, check out this video. For those of you who have been testing Jamboard with your teams, here are eight new updates to help you jam even easier.

1. Use Jamboard in Canada and the U.K. now.

Starting today, you can use Jamboard to collaborate with teammates in Canada and the United Kingdom. This means that your Chicago office can have a product development working session with their Toronto counterparts, or your marketing team in New York can redline the latest website proposal live with the London headquarters. Of course, any team can still view and participate remotely via the Jamboard iOS or Android apps.

2. Duplicate and select objects on Jamboard easier.

Now, you can duplicate objects on your Jamboard screen or mobile device. Select an object and click on the duplicate icon on the upper right-hand corner. You can also select drawings and objects—like post-its, stickers, and images—and easily move or resize them using the “Lasso” selection tool.

3. Try out “Glide Typing.”

Jamboard now offers “Glide Typing”—a way to type by swiping your finger across letters on your keyboard—so you can add text to a jam even quicker.

4. Share your work with teammates fast.

Ready to get feedback on a project from colleagues? Click “Add people” in the Jamboard app, and it will auto-suggest contacts based on history, matching address book contacts and your email domain. When you add an individual, they receive a notification in their email just like in Google Docs.

5. Redline text to edit jams like you would on paper, but better.

You now have the option to edit text within jams using the stylus. To delete, simply strike over a letter you’d like to remove from a word. To insert letters, write them either above or below the word and draw a small arrow to insert them. To merge, select a text object and drag it to another text object. Check it out.

6. Add your favorite GIFs.

Jamboard now supports adding GIF images via Google Drive, so you can add dynamic images to your jams. Or, you know, a team pick-me-up.

7. Move objects to adjacent jam frames.

By popular demand, objects can now be moved to adjacent jam frames or pages. Just select and glide the image toward the left or right edge of your screen.

8. Additional reporting for Jamboard admins.

For the G Suite admins out there, you can now see historical data for Wi-Fi network strength (RSSI), Wi-Fi network speed and board online/offline status in the Jamboard Admin console.

Start jamming

Creative agencies, professional services companies and teams in a variety of industries are using Jamboard to collaborate from different locations more effectively. For a full list of Jamboard updates, check out What’s New in Jamboard, or you can visit google.com/jamboard to see how you can start jamming with your colleagues today.