Google has several services — as well as its underlying commercial cloud infrastructure — that have previously received FedRAMP High authorizations. But with this latest spate of authorizations, the company adds many services that are in demand for government customers, like AI, zero-trust security, and data and analytics tools.

In an interview with FedScoop ahead of the announcement, Leigh Palmer, vice president of technology, strategy and delivery for Google Public Sector, said this not only gives federal civilian agencies that work with highly sensitive data sets — like those in health care, law enforcement, finance and emergency response, among others — a long list of new tools to work with, but they’re also hosted in a commercial environment, which she said comes with added benefits.

“These are certified on our commercial cloud, not a separate [government-specific] cloud instance,” Palmer said, referencing the model some cloud vendors have used to create separate cloud enclaves limited only to government work for security reasons. “Which means that you have the full capability of commercial cloud, right? More regions, more elasticity, more data, compute, storage, etc.”

That’s particularly important, she said, as the Office of Management and Budget in draft guidance issued last fall pushes to modernize FedRAMP — short for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program — with more of a focus placed on agencies using commercial cloud services instead of the government-specific offerings.

“Instead of having physical separation, we have logical separation [through] encryption. So we can run the same workloads on our commercial cloud without having to have that physical separation,” Palmer said. “Whenever you have to do that, it’s going to be difficult to keep parity across the environments.”

On top of that, the compute-intensive tools — such as AI — that more and more agencies are beginning to use will stand to benefit from the scale of commercial cloud, she added.

“As you look towards AI and things that are going to require, you know, heavy, massive amounts of compute, it’s going to be much more cost-effective and easy for our customers to do that in a commercial cloud than in [a government-specific] environment,” Palmer said.

On the topic of the federal government’s recent work to modernize FedRAMP, she added that Google is “really optimistic and encouraged by the modernization changes that are happening at FedRAMP.”

“At the end of the day, I think what we all want is more capabilities in the government’s hands faster” and done so safely, Palmer said.

The new authorizations come after Google Public Sector last month announced that defense and intelligence agencies were approved to use Google’s air-gapped cloud platform, Google Distributed Cloud Hosted, to process top-secret workloads. Palmer called the achievements “complementary” to one another, and added that Google is continuing work to add more services that meet the Department of Defense’s IL-5 compliance for some of its most sensitive but unclassified workloads.

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At the same time, executives are also being asked to integrate smarter tools into their operations to help their employees work more productively. 

At  Google Cloud Next ’24, Google Cloud experts Ganesh Chilakapati, director of product management and Luke Camery, group product manager, were joined by executives from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), UK energy retailer OVO and Air Liquide, a global industrial gases supplier, to discuss how Google Cloud’s generative AI capabilities are helping to achieve those objectives.

How Gemini safeguards your data 

Chilakapati and Camery demonstrated some of Gemini’s and Google Workspace’s signature capabilities, emphasizing features such as client-side encryption and comprehensive security frameworks. They also explained what happens to data inside Gemini.

“What is Gemini doing with all this data? How is it providing these customized and targeted responses that are so helpful? Is it learning and training on all of my enterprise data? No, it’s not. All of the privacy commitments we’ve made over the many decades to Google Workspace customers remain true,” said Chilakapati.

“Your data is your data and strictly stays within the workspace data boundary. Your privacy is protected, your content is not used for any other customers, and all of your existing data protections are automatically applied,” he added.

Your data, your trust boundary, managed by you

“Everything happens within your Google Workspace trust boundary. That means you have the ability to control whether or not Gemini stores not only the user prompts but also the generated responses. It’s completely up to you,” added Camery.

“One of the things we’re most excited to announce is the general availability of AI classification for Google Drive. This is a privacy-preserving customer-specific model that you have the option to train on your own specific corpus using your unique data class taxonomy,” said Camery.  “Leveraging AI classification and the guarantees that we’ve built into Gemini itself, you can have a virtuous cycle where you are leveraging AI while protecting your organization from emerging threats.”

Unparalleled Security: 5 key takeaways

Chilakapati and Camery stressed how the platform is designed to offer unparalleled security, built on the robust foundations of Google’s secure cloud infrastructure:

·  Enterprise terms of operation: Gemini operates strictly under processor enterprise terms, even when fetching the latest information from the internet, not on consumer controller terms.

·  Client-side encryption extension: Enterprises that have traditionally leveraged client-side encryption capabilities, ensuring that sensitive data remains inaccessible, can extend that one step further to protect against access attempts by any unauthorized entity, including other generative AI models.

·  Foundation on secure cloud infrastructure: Gemini is constructed on Google’s secure cloud platform, providing a solid foundation to enhance the overall security posture.

·  Zero-trust architecture: Zero-trust protocols are built in, not bolted on, not just on Google Cloud’s foundation but all the way up the stack to Gemini itself.

·  Sovereign controls integration: Gemini is also seamlessly integrated into an enterprise’s sovereign controls for Google Workspace, ensuring the integrity of data’s digital sovereignty journey, regardless of wherever you are in the world.

How Gemini AI is boosting productivity for the global workforce

Those features are especially important to customers like Soren Thomassen, director of IT solutions at UNFPA, which operates in 150 countries. Thomassen initially started using Gemini in May of 2023 to make chat functionality available to the fund’s entire user base. He began piloting Gemini Workspace last November.

“As an agency, safety and privacy is paramount. That’s why we were quick at rolling out the Gemini Chatbot because it’s covered by the same rules and the same controls as with Workspace.”

How Gemini AI is boosting productivity for the global workforce

Thomassen also pointed out how Gemini AI is helping UNFPA’s global workforce work more productively.

“Our users have been using it as a superpower writing assistant,” he said. Project managers spend a lot of time writing proposals.  “Instead of starting out with a blank screen…they can at least have a zero-draft that they can start working with. But the feedback that’s on my heart the most was when I hear those who have English as a second language say that Gemini helps them get their ideas across a little bit more clearly. Gemini (helps) everybody write English perfectly. And I think that’s important for a global organization.”

Jeremy Gibbons, Air Liquide’s digital and IT CTO, and Simon Goldsmith, OVO’s enterprise security and platforms lead, echoed Thomassen’s testament to Gemini’s utility. Each attested how the strategic deployment of Gemini within their organizations helped bolster productivity and ensure security. A recurrent theme throughout their conversation was the transformative potential of AI in reimagining work securely.

“I like to think of Workspace as kind of a walled garden of Eden,” said Goldsmith. “We want to give our people a really amazing experience in that garden… and allow them to experiment. But at the same time, within that safe environment, Workspace gives us the ability to, at an enterprise level, do the sensitive detective and corrective control work.”

Learn more about how Google Public Sector can help your organization “Kickstart your generative AI journey.”

This article was produced by Scoop News Group and sponsored by Google Public Sector. Google Public Sector is an underwriter of AI Week.

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One groundbreaking development in pathology and cancer detection is the augmented reality microscope (ARM). During a session at Google Cloud Next ’24, experts discussed how the ARM is poised to revolutionize cancer diagnosis. The initiative is a collaboration between the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs (VA), DOD’s Defense Innovation Unit, Google Public Sector and Jenoptik.

The AI-assisted microscope provides not only a view of how AI is increasing the diagnostic accuracy and efficiency of cancer detection but also its ability to operate on edge devices to support medical and other professionals. That allows those professionals to operate locally, independent of internet or cloud connectivity. That’s becoming increasingly critical as the number of experienced healthcare specialists qualified to perform diagnostic evaluations is declining in the U.S.

ARM’s impact also extends beyond individual diagnoses. By digitizing tissue samples and harnessing the power of AI, the microscope eliminates geographical barriers, ensuring that patients everywhere have access to the expertise of top-tier pathologists.

A look at the development process

The genesis of the ARM lies in the recognition of a critical challenge faced by pathologists — the meticulous task of analyzing tissue slides, often numbering in the hundreds, to detect cancerous abnormalities. While traditional microscopes are indispensable, they present inherent limitations in terms of efficiency and accuracy, which are compounded by the sheer volume of data pathologists need to process.

The ARM integrates artificial intelligence (AI) into the diagnostic process. At its core, this device leverages AI algorithms deployed on the edge to analyze digitized tissue samples in real time. This transformative approach enables pathologists to identify potential abnormalities with unprecedented speed and precision, significantly enhancing diagnostic accuracy.

“The job of pathologists is to make sure that what we do is very accurate and that we can identify the disease. We don’t want to make a mistake,” said Dr. Nadeem Zafar, director of pathology and laboratory medicine service at Veterans Affairs Puget Sound. “This is where the technology comes in, and this is why we are so excited about it.”

The development process of the (ARM) also illustrates the power of collaboration. “Here at Google… we don’t just want to incrementally improve things like cancer diagnosis; we want to do it at scale,” said Scott Frohman, head of defense programs for Google Cloud. “And this project enabled us to think and connect and do something good for humanity.”

Current and future impacts

Central to the microscope’s functionality is its ability to highlight areas of interest detected by AI algorithms, providing pathologists with guidance during the diagnostic process. In addition, combining AI-driven insights with human expertise will empower healthcare professionals to make more informed decisions with greater confidence.

“Why I’m so excited about this technology is that it will bring so many experts to your desktop — while in the workflow, while in the flow of time,” Dr. Zafar said. “This is not something you have to learn. As long as you have the software… it will start giving you the heatmap and help detect cancer. So this is brilliant.”

In addition, this endeavor’s success underscores the pivotal role of public-private partnerships in driving innovation and advancing healthcare. Through concerted efforts and a shared vision, stakeholders across government, industry, and academia have made the ARM a reality, with tangible benefits for patients and healthcare providers alike.

“We know that we can’t solve these kinds of problems alone. So the partnership that we have with the government has been fantastic for bringing the subject matter expertise, the data, and the commitment to solving this problem with us,” said Frohman. “And it helps us to do the mission that we have at Google — making information available and accessible during cancer and making the human condition better every day.”

Thanks to AI and edge computing, the ARM promises to redefine the standard of care in pathology, offering new hope in the relentless pursuit of a cancer-free future.

Learn more about how Google Public Sector can help your organization “Kickstart your generative AI journey.”

This article was produced by Scoop News Group and sponsored by Google Public Sector. Google Public Sector is an underwriter of AI Week.

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A frenetic energy consumed the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino, with so much of that excitement focused on the untapped potential of generative artificial intelligence in every industry. During his keynote to open the conference, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian acknowledged the many massive global corporations like Goldman Sachs, Mercedes Benz and Uber that are using the company’s AI technology to innovate.

And in such an excitable, flashy environment, it’s easy for Google’s budding work with public sector entities to get overshadowed. But despite that, top leaders from Google see huge opportunities for the many new products and announcements out of Next to impact their partners across federal, state and local governments and academia, forecasting continued growth for the nearly two-year-old public sector arm of the Silicon Valley cloud giant.

Karen Dahut, CEO, Google Public Sector

With a sizable portion of Next announcements dedicated to AI, Karen Dahut pointed to “all of the work around building a fully integrated enterprise-grade AI stack” as “so important to our public-sector customers.”

That focus on “enterprise-grade” is the key, she told FedScoop. “It’s not a consumer product being used in enterprise; it is an enterprise product built for large, complex bureaucratic organizations.”

Security also matters a great deal with AI, as it does for any part of the public sector enterprise IT stack, and Dahut pointed to that as a differentiator for Google’s cloud and AI offerings, particularly with a new security operations tool built on Google’s Gemini generative AI platform.

“Security operations are top of mind for all of our federal, state and local governments,” she said. “And knowing that Google Cloud is the most secure cloud — and we continue to build on that — is super important to them.”

Dahut suggested that nearly two years in since the creation of Google Public Sector in June 2022, the organization is still early on in its journey to scale as a major service provider in the public sector technology ecosystem.

The thing that “gives me such confidence in what we are doing is the passion that our customers bring to us,” Dahut explained. “They want to work with us,” she said, referring to partnerships with major customers like the Department of Defense “to purpose-build technology.”

“This isn’t a case where we’re building technology in the back room, and then we come and try to get it accredited,” Dahut said. “We are working very closely with them to build what they need and accredit it along the way.”

She continued: “And that partnership, and that passion for what we’re doing, transcends just Google — our customers feel it, too. So it’s very gratifying.”

Leigh Palmer, VP of Delivery and Operations, Google Public Sector

As Dahut said, Google has worked to position itself as the leader in cloud security to differentiate itself from other cloud services competitors like Amazon and Microsoft.

In that same vein, for Leigh Palmer, Google Public Sector’s new accreditation for Google Distributed Cloud Hosted to handle secret and top secret data for the Department of Defense and intelligence community was the biggest announcement to come out of the conference.

“I like to tell people that sometimes there’s a benefit to being third to market, right? So we could see what went before us and make adjustments for very specific mission sets,” Palmer said in an interview with FedScoop, referring to Google’s biggest competition.

With the authorizations, agencies across the Department of Defense and the intelligence community can use Google Distributed Cloud Hosted — an air-gapped private cloud service tailored to workloads that demand maximized security requirements — to support some of their most sensitive data and applications. It also comes with “core AI services out of the box,” like language translation, search, Document AI and others, Palmer explained.

“What we did when we built and designed GDC-H is we built that cloud from the ground up. So instead of taking a cloud and trying to shrink it into a small form factor, we started with the small form factor and made it expandable, right?” Palmer said. “So open Kubernetes-based, very open source software with the idea of multi-cloud, hybrid cloud in mind. Very customized for data analytics and AI at the edge, because that is our sweet spot. That is what Google is really good at.”

Because of the small form factor, there’s immense flexibility, particularly for sensitive missions at the edge, she said.

“So lots of flexibility for that mission need between kind of that enterprise scale, that tactical scale, and then that middle scale of, you know, ‘I need it to be in a data center in Germany,’ for example,” Palmer added.

Sandra Joyce, VP of Mandiant Intelligence

Much of the hype concerning AI has been focused on its ability to drive and defend against new cyberattacks. Many have predicted that threat actors will use AI and gain an upper hand to keep ahead of an organization’s network defenses.

But largely, that is not yet the case, Sandra Joyce told FedScoop, calling it a “period of opportunity” for network defenders in the public sector the bolster their use of AI for cybersecurity.

Joyce said Mandiant tracks “threat actors from nation states, cybercriminals, hacktivists, all types. And thankfully, right now we’re in this real period of opportunity is what I like to call it. Of all the breaches that we investigate, we’re not seeing AI as the main factor in any of those breaches, which means to me that we have an opportunity to develop our own AI for defenses.”

Where Mandiant sees AI being used by hackers is for “information operations,” Joyce said. “We’re seeing it in the underground, with purported jailbreaks of chatbots that they can provide access to. These pretty low-level and very questionable things. It’s experimentation. So there’s not a ton going on that I would say would outpace what you could traditionally do in the threat landscape.”

But on the cyber defense side, things are moving more dramatically, she said, particularly in the ability to supplement the global shortage in cybersecurity talent.

“What we’re doing with AI internally is very exciting. We’re using it for many different uses, including productivity. So we’re using it to reverse [engineer] malware faster. We’re using it to look at adversary smart contracts. We’re doing that type of experimentation and putting it into our workflows. And we’re already getting some gains in productivity,” she said. “And that’s the important part. Because if you’re looking at the future of cybersecurity, what it really is, is a growing problem, and we cannot keep throwing people at the problem. We need to have technical solutions and AI is one way we can start doing that.”

During her time at Next, Joyce and her colleagues at Google-owned Mandiant also spoke about the frustrations that are keeping CISOs up at night.

Chris Hein, Director of Customer Engineering, Google Public Sector

As the director of customer engineering, Chris Hein inherently serves in a more technical role for Google Public Sector. Despite that, the biggest impact felt from the many announcements out of Next, from Hein’s perspective, is the changing nature of how the government relates to its constituents.

“You think about how many of these services are being built out from like a customer perspective. And so what I really enjoy doing, and I think it’s really important for government agencies to think about, is how do they take their constituent services and make them 10 times better than they are today,” Hein told FedScoop.

Though AI models are often shrouded in new levels of complexity from a technical level in how they function, for public sector entities, the barrier for entry to use them is actually quite low, he said.

“Being able to use these things does not take a whole lot of work or a whole lot of know-how. And so I think it really starts to open the door for way better experiences,” Hein said.

With that, it’s still so important, he said, to “do it safely, responsibly, making sure that we’re reducing hallucinations, and all those kinds of things that we talk about these days.”

“You have to start from first principles on a lot of these things,” Hein said, referencing building that safety and responsibility into AI. “What Google has been building, when we look at our AI strategy, is building on top of this overall zero-trust environment that starts from the ground up. The number one thing we’re going to care about is the security of that dataset and the privacy of that dataset. And so AI is not new to that — that’s just another aspect of that exact same paradigm that we’ve been so focused on for so long.”

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During a session on public sector innovation at Google Cloud Next ’24, leaders from the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund, and the United Nations Office for Project Services shared strategies for boosting productivity by fostering operational consistency and shared understanding. They also stressed the importance of transparency and continuous feedback and focused on the tangible benefits of eased workloads and enhanced efficiencies.

Enhancing collaboration

Public sector agencies operating worldwide are adopting cloud-based collaboration tools to create a more integrated work environment where documents and projects are easily accessible anytime and on any device. This shift not only boosts productivity but also enhances the flexibility of working environments by giving employees more universal access to agency resources and reports from offices around the world. It also helps overcome language barriers by providing translation services. And it helps ensure communications with international partners meet agency standards across different time zones and geographies. 

Justin Waugh, head of platforms, ITG enterprise platforms team at UNOPS, highlighted the transformative impact of Google Workspace in managing extensive infrastructure projects involving frequent account and project turnover. By leveraging Workspace tools like Google Docs and Sheets, UNOPS has streamlined project management and data handling and significantly reduced operational friction while enhancing user experience.

“The key thing to remember is to reduce friction for people using the systems that we’ve got, and we’ve been heavily into the book to do that,” said Waugh.

Waugh’s comments underscored the importance of integrating various Google products within organizational applications. Doing so facilitates more seamless project communication, budgeting and reporting. This strategic integration has allowed UNOPS to maintain standardized procedures across projects, fostering consistency and understanding throughout the organization.

Leveraging AI enterprise search solutions for efficient and confident information access

One of the standout applications of AI within the public sector is improving information access through enterprise search solutions. AI-powered search tools within Google Workspace can easily access vast amounts of data to find relevant documents, emails, and files. This capability is particularly transformative for government agencies, where quickly retrieving and correlating information can influence policy-making and public service delivery.

Raman Pugalumperumal, senior IT officer and lead for AI and ML platforms at the World Bank, discussed how Vertex AI and Google Cloud Search have revolutionized their data management practices. The World Bank, which manages extensive financial and economic analysis datasets, has benefited from the enhanced speed and accuracy these tools provide.

“We can measure things with quantitative information… we’re able to do [certain things] faster, or maybe things which we weren’t able to do — they’re able to do it because of the volume process,” said Pugalumperumal.

Pugalumperumal explained how AI is being used to quicken information retrieval, creating a more responsive and productive environment. This shift towards leveraging AI in its operations has unlocked new avenues for global access and sharing the World Bank’s wealth of knowledge, positioning AI as a pivotal asset in its mission to distribute developmental knowledge.

At UNFPA, IT Director Nayanesh Bhandutia said they’re working on developing an AI-powered search experience product. “We aim to break the data silos. We don’t want our users to worry about the data source when they’re looking for something,” said Bhadutia.

“This will be very time-saving because now the global population is not going through the pain of finding information.”

Maintaining the flow of multilingual work with AI-assisted translation 

Another significant advantage of integrating AI with Google Workspace in the public sector is overcoming language barriers. AI-driven language translation tools embedded within Google Workspace allow government employees from different linguistic backgrounds to collaborate effectively.

At UNFPA, IT Director Nayanesh Bhandutia highlighted the transformative role of the Gemini AI interface within Google Workspace. Introduced initially to simplify operations, Gemini has evolved to solve more complex challenges, particularly in multilingual settings. The AI-driven tool has been instrumental in helping staff draft clear and concise communications in English, Spanish, French, and Arabic.

“The introduction of Gemini has solved the [fluency] problem. Our users are getting more confident, and they’re spending less time making revisions, but we want to take it to the next level. We noticed many potentials,” said Bhandutia.

The potential for AI to extend beyond basic translations to fully integrated document management systems is vast. Bhandutia shared ambitious plans to leverage Gemini AI to automate the generation of critical documents, such as requests for proposals and job descriptions, which would reduce administrative overhead and enhance responsiveness.

For example, teams can use AI to translate documents and emails directly within the Google Workspace environment when collaborating on international aid programs or global policy initiatives. This seamless integration of translation services helps maintain the flow of work without the interruptions typically caused by language differences, fostering stronger connections and more cohesive teamwork.

“It is a fantastic stepping stone in the technology sector — [the capability] to deliver what people need…this is an excellent step towards accessibility,” said Waugh.

The future of AI and public sector innovation

The ongoing advancements in AI are expected to introduce more sophisticated tools for predictive analytics, supporting complex decision-making and personalized public services. These developments will not only drive greater efficiency within agencies but also enhance the quality of services provided to the public.

By leveraging these tools, government agencies are enhancing their operational capabilities and setting new standards for accessibility, efficiency, and collaboration in public service.

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While advances in search technology have provided government employees with more powerful search tools, the dramatic growth of multi-modal data in all its forms has made search, and the ability to find the right information in petabytes of datasets more challenging than ever.

That was the challenge the United States Patent and Trademark Office and its patent examiners were facing, setting the stage for taking a new approach to search, enabled by advanced AI technologies. 

In a strategic partnership with Accenture Federal Services and Google Cloud, USPTO has developed and implemented a comprehensive system to refine its search mechanisms. This initiative has been about upgrading the traditional examination protocols, providing examiners with new, swift and precise search capabilities that respond to the complexity and scale of modern innovations.

At Google Cloud Next ’24, Jonathan Horner, supervisory patent IT specialist at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and Ian Wetherbee, software engineer at Google, joined Anna Hoffman, USPTO lead at Accenture Federal Services, on stage to discuss the agency’s ambitious efforts to leverage AI.  

The USPTO’s initiative highlights a broader challenge public agencies face in reviewing mountains of documents, artifacts and existing application decisions—and identifying where else in the world similar work may be underway and what’s verifiable. Until recently, Generative AI platforms had limited ability to provide grounded or verifiably sourced content in real time from the Internet.

“One of the things we recently announced is Grounding with Google Search,” said Katharyn White, head of public sector marketing for Google Cloud in a podcast from Google Cloud Next.

“Grounded means we know the source that the AI is using to come up with the answer. It’s grounded in a data source that you can check and ensure that is giving you the results that you want. And we’re making that easier.” 

For the USPTO, the need for advanced search capabilities meant first tackling its internal data retrieval and analytics capabilities.

Horner detailed the constitutional roots of patent law and the monumental task of examining each application against all human knowledge. “That’s a lot of information to go through… You’re looking for a needle in a stack of other needles,” Horner said, explaining the enormity of their challenge.

Traditionally, patent examiners relied on Boolean search techniques. However, with the exponential increase in information, these tools became increasingly inadequate for maintaining the high standards required for U.S. patents, said Horner. To address this, the USPTO has turned to AI, deploying tools in production that are not only efficient but also explainable, respecting the office’s duty to the public and applicants.

Hoffman discussed the journey starting in 2019 with a small prototype aimed to demonstrate that AI could meet these challenges. She mentioned conducting dozens of interviews and workshops, deploying a modern Google infrastructure and launching a prototype within three months—a pace unheard of in federal government operations. The prototype focused on finding prior art — evidence that an invention might already exist — that examiners might likely have missed otherwise.  The pilot paved the way for production features like showing “more like this” documents, enabling examiners to find similar documents more effectively.

“This feature became used by examiners immediately, which allowed us to run with a much bigger and more robust AI user interface directly similar to the examiner search system called Similarity Search,” Hoffman added. 

Google’s Wetherbee emphasized the necessity of “supporting the full Boolean search syntax as the model’s input.” A robust data collection process involved over a million data points from human raters and a pattern corpus of over 170 million documents. 

“There are hundreds of millions of citations inside patterns. It’s a huge corpus of over two terabytes of text content…We were able to process all of this human-rated data and the pattern data using Google infrastructure and turn that into training data to train our models,” said Wetherbee. 

Horner reiterated that despite technological advancements, the examiner is “still in the driver’s seat. All of these tools are based on an examiner’s ability to guide the AI towards what it is looking for, and that’s very important to us.” It’s a symbiotic relationship where AI extends the reach of human capability rather than replacing it.

Adopting these AI tools signifies a broader shift within the federal landscape—embracing cutting-edge technology to ensure accuracy and efficiency in governmental functions. It also poses an example for other federal agencies that are considering a similar path toward digital transformation.

Learn more about how Google Public Sector can help your organization “Kickstart your generative AI journey.”

This article was produced by Scoop News Group and sponsored by Google Public Sector. Google Public Sector is an underwriter of AI Week.

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One challenge that remains at the forefront of those efforts is ensuring that today’s increasingly dynamic and distributed IT environments continue to meet the government’s complex security, regulatory and data privacy compliance rules — while learning how best to capitalize on AI’s potential to serve the public.

Google Cloud’s understanding and recognition of those challenges was widely reflected in a series of sweeping announcements at last week’s Google Cloud Next ’24, that promise new levels of security, flexibility and AI-assisted capabilities to Google Cloud’s public sector customers.

Building AI capabilities within protected workspaces

When it comes to securely managing public sector data, agencies using Google Cloud gain immediate benefits by building on top of its foundational architecture. Because the architecture was built for the cloud and also incorporates a substantial portion of federal security controls, it’s possible to demonstrate security compliance and obtain operating authority in weeks instead of months when folding in applications like Workspace or AI models like Gemini.

Another way agencies can enhance the security of their workloads is by using the Google Cloud Assured Workloads, which also have foundational government security compliance assurances built in, according to a panel of technology experts speaking at Google Cloud Next ’24.

The panelists, representing NASA, Palo Alto Networks, SAP and Google Cloud, argued that using zero-trust and compliance-as-a-code technologies has become essential to creating and maintaining easily reproducible compliant workload environments. That’s in part because of the diversity of government agency compliance requirements, from FedRAMP to the Department of Defense Impact Level 2, 4, and 5 security controls. 

By deploying workloads in pre-certified, software-defined environments set up to limit activity to compliant products and restrict where data can flow and who can access it, agencies can better ensure their workloads meet government requirements.

“Moving to Assured GCP is not just an upgrade; it’s a transformational leap forward,” said Collin Estes, the CIO of MRI Technologies working at NASA.

He pointed to two benefits: The “ability to generate compliant documentation as both a product of these large language models as well as helping us produce very well-structured definitions of what we’re doing, based on your actual implementations within Google Cloud. It is not a human saying, here’s what we do. It is us generating what we do from our environment. I think that’s going to really change the game in terms of how federal agencies manage risk across these portfolios.”

Among other benefits, the panelists pointed to:

Streamlining software development – Transitioning to Assured GCP allows government bodies to leverage and deploy cutting-edge technologies and methodologies, such as containerization and microservices, with unprecedented ease.

Focusing on the mission – By moving to Assured GCP, organizations can shift their focus from the backend to what truly matters—their mission. This shift represents not just an operational change but a philosophical one, where technology becomes an enabler rather than a hurdle in support of agency missions.

According to Palo Alto Networks Senior Manager Michael Clark, another reason for adopting Assured Workloads is the volume of data and the compute intensity with all this data. “We’re at that critical pivot point. We’ve been using this data to learn new threats and find zero-day threats so that we can enforce zero trust, improve security protection mechanisms, and map into new areas of innovation for threat detection and automated remediation.”

When building a compliant environment, SAP’s NVP Architecture and Product Launch, Hunter Downey, urged session attendees “to build it within a framework that I can ensure controls are in place, so I can rinse and repeat across 20 to 100 different teams, potentially touching 1,000 or 5,000 developers. If you start with the lowest common denominator, you’re going to fail. The reason why we partnered with GCP Assured Workloads is because you’re able to control the flow of information and messages. The minute the data goes global, it’s a different jurisdiction.”

Among other AI-related developments announced at Google Cloud Next ‘24:

• Google Public Sector achieves Top Secret and Secret cloud authorization. 

• Gemini for Google Cloud is a new generation of AI assistants for developers, Google Cloud services and applications that help users work and navigate security challenges more effectively.
• See more announcements here. 

Learn more about how Google Public Sector can help your organization “Kickstart your AI and security journey”.

This article was produced by Scoop News Group and sponsored by Google Public Sector. Google Public Sector is an underwriter of AI Week.

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“In the last year, we have updated our strategic plan to focus on making sure that everyone understands our alignment with the mission itself. It’s not just about compliance. It’s not just about following the law. Yes, it is about following the law. But it’s not just about that,” USAID CIO Jason Gray said during a panel Tuesday at Google Cloud’s annual tech conference Next. “It’s about making sure that we’re supporting the missions and enabling and empowering them.”

USAID’s IT strategic plan, which runs from 2024 through 2028, is built around five pillars: “creating a culture of data- and insights-based decision making; delivering agile, secure, and resilient IT platforms; building worldwide skills and capacity; establishing pragmatic governance; and driving high operational performance.”

Gray said USAID’s journey to adopt cloud has been “critical” in better connecting tech to mission in recent years, namely by making it easier to connect and collaborate in austere environments around the world where USAID is called to deliver aid.

“Some of the areas and countries that we operate in, even getting power, reliable power is a massive challenge,” he said, adding that there are also “bandwidth concerns or severe latency.”

When Gray joined USAID as CIO in 2022, the agency was already well on its way to adopting cloud and had an existing partnership with Google Cloud — one that he credits as key in fostering communication and collaboration across international lines while taking care of the basic security requirements.

“Being able to collaborate across the world in real-time through the document management [tool], the security … is absolutely critical, as well,” Gray said. “And knowing that you are encrypting data in use, in transit, at rest” has been critical “because we’re complying, yes, we’re securing things but also enabling our end users to communicate with the implementing partners in the areas that we operate in.”

USAID was recognized in February by Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., ranking member on the House Oversight Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation, as the only federal agency to receive an A grade on the latest FITARA scorecard.

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With the authorizations, agencies across the Department of Defense and the intelligence community can use Google Distributed Cloud Hosted — an air-gapped private cloud service tailored to workloads that demand maximized security requirements — to support some of their most sensitive data and applications. 

Google also announced that it received authorization to host data and applications at the secret level for intelligence community missions. 

“This authorization underscores Google Public Sector’s commitment to empowering government agencies with secure, cutting-edge technology,” Leigh Palmer, vice president of delivery and operations for Google Public Sector, wrote in a blog post previewed by FedScoop before the announcement. She referenced “personnel records, information around pending cyber threats, geospatial data used for maps, language translation in support of humanitarian efforts, and more” as examples of the types of data the cloud environment can now support.

Not to be confused with Google public cloud offerings, Google Distributed Cloud Hosted was developed to be isolated and doesn’t require connection to the internet or Google Cloud.

In addition to boosted security, the company touts Google Distributed Cloud Hosted’s integrated cloud services, notably Vertex AI, a platform that supports the development of generative AI applications with more than 130 pre-trained AI models and offers access to Gemini, Google’s own multimodal large-language model. 

Lastly, Palmer in the blog points to the openness at the foundation of the platform as a differentiator. “GDC Hosted is designed around Google Cloud’s open cloud strategy and uses leading open source components in its platform and managed services. This openness includes support for managed open source services operated by our partners that are tightly integrated into the platform, providing a seamless user experience across management, billing, and support,” she wrote. 

The announcement comes after Google in December 2022 achieved an IL-5 accreditation to work with DOD’s highly sensitive, mission-critical and national security data workloads. 

Some of Google’s top competitors — Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle — also reached top-secret accreditation in recent years. Notably, the four companies also hold spots on the premier cloud contracts in the DOD and IC, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability and Commercial Cloud Enterprise vehicles, respectively. 

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Jamie Holcombe, chief information officer in the patent office, said that when it comes to adoption of emerging technologies like AI, leadership within the federal government needs to change the culture and incentive structure of the workforce.

“Culture, culture, culture. I don’t care about the tech. We can solve it. We prove that you can. But it’s the culture, if they’re willing to receive [new tech]. Unless there’s a burning platform, a lot of people will say, ‘I’ll [have] somebody else do it, I’ll figure it out later,’” Holcombe said during the Google Public Sector Forum hosted by Scoop News Group in Washington, D.C.

“Especially with government bureaucracy, we have so many people that are just incentivized to sit there and punch their card, turn the paper or, you know, sign this and put it over here, I did my job,” he added. “We need to change and challenge the status quo, we need to get a sense of urgency and incentive for our government workers.”

The USPTO in 2021 sent its top engineers to Google to be certified in TensorFlow and develop neural network feedback loops for patent examiners to rate algorithms, as well as to apply machine learning and AI to patent classification, search and quality.

Holcombe was highly critical of the federal government’s approach to innovation and long-term modernization during the Google forum.

“Our budgeting process is stupid. Our procurement is stupid. Everything we do in the government is pretty stupid, when you compare it to the commercial world, right?” Holcombe said. “There’s so many lessons that no one is willing to take. Who in their right mind would run a commercial enterprise or operation using a budget that was conceived three years ago?”

He also highlighted key differences between how the federal government and the private sector operate when it comes to emerging technologies like AI.

“If we ran our government like we ran Silicon Valley, we’d be much more efficient,” Holcombe said. “Can you imagine the Silicon Valley guy saying, ‘Wait a second, I have to fill all my compliance things before I prove my product works in the marketplace? What are you freaking kidding me?’” 

Google Public Sector Managing Director Aaron Weis pushed back on Holcombe regarding government compliance.

“We do compliance for the government, so we actually have to get all our Google products accredited,” Weis said. “So we’re gonna fill out all the government’s compliance forms, but we might use AI to do it now.”

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