GCP – Google Cloud unique technology enables new DoD capabilities

Google Cloud is a platform delivering services that range from basic infrastructure to unique, differentiated services that empower users to accomplish a mission or business task. It allows our Department of Defense (DoD) and other public sector customers to innovate with unmatched security, scale, and service. So what makes us so different from the next cloud provider?

Security and compliance in software versus hardware

At Google Cloud, we see accreditation as a systems problem that can be delivered on Google’s differentiated software and security stack. As pioneers of Zero Trust, we’ve taken a fundamentally different approach to ensuring IL5 compliance is available across our infrastructure. We use a software-defined community cloud (SDCC), Assured Workloads, to isolate sensitive workloads in our Google Cloud infrastructure. This approach ensures public sector customers can take full advantage of our scalable platform while also maximizing security. By focusing on the actual security of our capabilities, including alignment with the latest NIST standards, we are able to meet and often exceed the standards required for government security. Public sector customers need security, compute power and capabilities with a modern cloud partner. We are helping customers move ‘beyond GovClouds: building a secure, AI-enabled government.’

True security should be easy to maintain. That’s why Google Cloud Assured Workloads operates as a switch that customers can use to tailor their execution environment to their unique security and compliance needs.

For those requiring fully isolated platforms with top-tier security, Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) Hosted is the answer. GDC Hosted is air-gapped and does not require connectivity to Google Cloud or the public internet to manage the infrastructure, services, APIs, or tooling. It is built to remain disconnected in perpetuity.GDC Hosted provides advanced cloud services, including AI solutions like Translation API and Speech-to-Text — all features of our Vertex AI platform. GDC Hosted is built on the Kubernetes API, and uses leading open source components in its platform and managed services. Additionally, it offers extensibility through a marketplace featuring independent software vendors’ applications.

Our cloud is built to handle the largest consumer services on the planet

With six products each boasting over two billion users each, our commitment to maintaining the most robust and secure network is imperative. We consistently handle approximately a quarter of the world’s network traffic. To effectively manage this monumental volume, we’ve meticulously constructed our network from scratch, resulting in one of the world’s largest privately managed networks. This extensive network seamlessly connects 39 regions, 118 zones, and 187 edge locations across 200+ countries and territories, all underpinned by our ownership of 14 subsea cables. For the wide range of service members stationed across the world, the Google network delivers unmatched bandwidth and very low latency in those challenging locations.

Furthermore, Google Cloud now offers the market’s most comprehensive cloud service portfolio for U.S. public sector clients, encompassing nine supported regions and 28 zones. This empowers federal, state, local, and educational entities to leverage the security, performance, scalability, and efficiency advantages of Google Cloud. We continue to add IL5 offerings that play a pivotal role in supporting the most substantial consumer services.

Google Cloud’s focus on security also extends to our network. We stopped the largest HTTP requests per second DDoS attack ever from hitting one of our Google Cloud customers, and we stopped the largest network bits per second DDoS attack of all time from hitting our own services. This diligence allows us to have the high bandwidth, low latency, and incredibly secure network Google Cloud users demand. This best-in-class infrastructure is fully available for our public sector customers to take advantage of, ensuring they have the speed and security they need at all times, complete with the data residency controls you need to keep everything exactly where you want it.

We value multi-cloud interoperability, and our open source philosophy sets the standard that other providers follow

We literally set the standard for cloud platforms around the world when we open sourced Kubernetes in 2014. Because we invented Kubernetes, we also have unique capabilities in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), our managed Kubernetes platform. For example, we can scale Kubernetes clusters to 15K nodes, which is why the largest consumer platforms in the world depend on GKE. We also make sure our customers can manage across cloud platforms with Anthos, giving users true interoperability and flexibility, even when other cloud platforms might prefer to keep them locked into a single platform.

BigQuery Omni is also helping our customers get more out of their data, no matter where it is. Powered by Anthos, BigQuery Omni directly queries the data in other cloud centers and brings our unparalleled data technology directly to your data, even if it lives somewhere else.

The right cloud for the workload: The power of commercial cloud for government

Unlike other providers that offer isolated “government clouds” lagging in performance and scalability, Google Cloud has obtainedIL 5 authorization across a growing set of services in our commercial cloud, with all the inherent benefits of Google Cloud’s reliability, scalability, and innovation. This means all customers can be confident they are collaborating securely, without having to deploy a separate government cloud that is often capacity limited, running dated software, and, on top of that, more expensive. The legacy approaches to data protection and cybersecurity protections have been eclipsed by more modern and sophisticated methods to manage these risks.

We help you get insights from your data, and our AI/ML tools move fast to help you move faster

Google Cloud has embraced the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems, investing heavily in creating AI/ML services that cover the depth and breadth of our customer’s needs. Whether through broadening access to services with 120 language variants in our text-to-speech tools, or processing AI requests on TPU v4 chips 2x faster than the prior generation, we remain committed to helping customers achieve exceptional AI results. We’re also democratizing data by creating capabilities in AutoML and BigQuery ML, ensuring everyone has access to the insights and decision-making power that AI/ML can bring. Delivering the latest AI/ML capabilities with BigQuery at the center of the platform has served commercial customers extremely well, and DoD can deliver their mission using the same technology.

We ensure your data stays in your control

As generative AI gains in popularity, it’s important to recognize that generative AI tools like Duet AI are only a small part of what AI can do. AI/ML capabilities within Google Cloud go much further. We take the custom models we create and externalize these for our customers to use on their own terms with data security they control.

Our AI services can deliver magical experiences while giving customers complete control of their data. We don’t use data that you provide us to train our own models without your permission. and we will not and cannot look at it without a legitimate need to support your use of the service – and even then it is only with your permission. The models we make are initially made for our consumer users and are only ever trained on publicly available data. Once we’ve created those models, such as Google Translate, image recognition, and natural language processing, we make those models available to our cloud users. This “one-way street” keeps your data entirely, and completely, yours.

We’re sustainable, and we help you be more sustainable too

Google Cloud is already carbon-neutral, matching 100% of our emissions with renewable energy, and we’re striving to have net-zero emissions by 2030. We extend our own sustainability insights to our customers, too. Google Cloud customers can use our Carbon Sense suite to see their own cloud emissions and take action to reduce their carbon footprints.

To learn more about how Google Cloud is serving Defense customers, visit Google Cloud for Department of Defense and Why Google Cloud.