Welcome to above the clouds

GCP – Looker now available from Google Cloud console
Looker helps make it easy to get insights from business data and to build data-driven applications with unified metrics for ease of collaboration. Today, we are bringing Looker to the Google Cloud console, making it simpler than ever to acquire, deploy, and manage Looker in your Google Cloud environment, in a solution we call Looker […]

GCP – Introducing BigQuery differential privacy and partnership with Tumult Labs
We are excited to announce the public preview of BigQuery differential privacy, an SQL building block that analysts and data scientists can use to anonymize their data. In the future, we’ll integrate differential privacy with BigQuery data clean rooms to help organizations anonymize and share sensitive data, all while preserving privacy. This launch adds differential […]

GCP – 5 steps to automating and streamlining your regulatory reporting
Regulatory reporting requirements continue to become more complex. In response, financial services institutions continue to devote more resources to ensure compliance year after year. This added complexity combined with technological challenges make it hard to produce reports that meet evolving regulatory needs. As a result, financial institutions have struggled to produce reports without adding significant […]

GCP – How ANZ Bank uses risk reporting as a change agent
Last year, Australia’s second-largest bank by assets under management – ANZ Bank – set out to accelerate its digital transformation to provide a single, consistent, high-quality set of corporate data across the organization. This dataset will enable personnel to swiftly glean insights, enhancing credit decisioning, credit risk comprehension, and the ability to reduce financial crime. […]

GCP – Your new regulatory reporting mantra: simple, fast, and repeatable
Following the 2008 global financial crisis, financial services institutions have invested heavily to keep pace with the changing regulatory landscape. Even well-resourced teams have been stretched thin trying to keep up with the evolving regulatory reporting requirements because of their dependencies on legacy technology and highly manual processes. At the same time, the velocity of […]

Azure – Retirement of SQL Server Native Client (SNAC) OLE DB provider for linked servers in Azure SQL Managed Instance
All existing linked server objects configured to use SQLNCLI will automatically switch to using the fully compatible third (current) generation of provider – known as Microsoft OLE DB Driver for SQL Server or MSOLEDBSQL. Read More for the details.

AWS – Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics announces new Synthetics NodeJS runtime version 4.0
Today, we are announcing an update for Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics canaries to use the Synthetics NodeJS runtime version 4.0. With this update, runtime version of AWS Lambda, executing the canaries, is updated to NodeJS 16.x. Read More for the details.

AWS – AWS Device Farm announces support for Rooted Android Private Devices
AWS Device Farm is an application testing service that provides web and mobile developers with desktop browsers and real mobile devices so that they can improve the quality of their apps. With today’s launch, we are adding support for Rooted Android devices in our private device fleets. With Rooted Android devices, customers will be able […]

AWS – Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 is now available in 4 additional regions
Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, the next version of Aurora Serverless, is now available in the Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Europe (Spain), Europe (Zurich) and Middle East (UAE). Read More for the details.
AWS – Amazon Rekognition launches face occlusion detection to improve identity verification accuracy
Today, AWS announced the general availability of face occlusion detection to improve face verification accuracy. The new FaceOccluded attribute in Amazon Rekognition DetectFaces and IndexFaces APIs detects if the face in an image is partially captured or not fully visible due to overlapping objects, clothing, and body parts. Read More for the details.