At Google Clouds biggest event of the year, Google Cloud Next, Google Cloud made a number of announcements with financial services leaders as they modernise their technology stack, migrate to the cloud at scale and deploy gen AI experiences.

The event reflects the growing importance of cloud services in financial services. By harnessing the power of cloud technology, data, and AI, financial institutions are creating better, more personalised and connected banking experiences that seamlessly blend with their consumers financial needs.

Zac Maufe (ZM): Cloud computing is a key enabler of transformation, helping financial institutions scale applications and services more efficiently and quickly than they could on their own bespoke servers and in physical data centres. With the cloud, banks are accelerating their modernisation strategies and unifying data across the enterprise, enabling them to grow their business, build new products, and mitigate risk by gaining insight from the huge amount of data they have.

Generative AI has ushered in an entirely new era of digital transformation for the financial services industry, piquing the interest of business leaders, who are increasingly recognising its potential to transform their operations and gain a competitive edge. As the enterprise shifts from gen AI experimentation to execution, were seeing more pilots move to full-scale production. Gen AI can be used to analyse data and generate insights that can help financial institutions make better decisions. It can help banks improve customer service, increase their efficiency and employee productivity, reduce their costs, and develop new and more personalised products and services.

ZM: We made a number of significant announcements with key Financial Services customers during Google Cloud Next 24. Citadel Securities is using Google Cloud to build the next generation of its quantitative research platform, increasing its research productivity and price-performance ratio. Discover Financial Services is bringing gen AI capabilities to nearly 10,000 contact centers agents to improve productivity through intelligent document summarisation, real-time search assistants, and enhanced self-service options. The new capabilities began rolling out in early 2024 and early results show that agents can reduce call handle time and improve policy and procedure search time by as much as 70%.

Scotiabank is leveraging Google Cloud technology to enhance client and employee experience, strengthen Bank security, and adopt gen AI more quickly. The Bank is using Vertex AI to build an LLM-powered chatbot for improved customer experience, and a LLM-powered Q&A and search for employees providing access to tailored knowledge and streamlining workflows. TD Bank is using Google Cloud infrastructure and top engineering talent to drive new levels of agility, customer-centricity, and engineering innovation, including an expanded relationship on the success of TD Securities Automated Trading using Google Clouds high performance GKE capabilities to adapt and quickly respond to changing market and client needs in a fast-paced investment environment.

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ZM: Banks continue to look for ways to improve the customer servicing experience. Google Cloud works with banks of all sizes to create and deliver compelling experiences for consumers. Banks are leveraging Google Clouds leading AI technologies for a variety of use cases, from providing personalised financial recommendations tailored for financial wellness to reducing fraud and mitigating financial risk for customers and the banks themselves.

One of the top use-cases were seeing that impact the day-to-day banking experience is Enhanced virtual assistants. This helps customers get accurate answers at speed and scale with less human intervention, by summarising conversations, and automating tasks. Another case use case is personalised financial recommendations, which Improves cross-sell and retention strategies through one-to-one instead of one-to-many messaging. Tailoring financial product recommendations via conversational language that is hyper-personalised and reinforces a you know me experience.Thirdly, Financial document search and synthesis. This transforms the home loan experience for borrowers and lenders by automating mortgage document processing reducing the processing time and streamlining data capture while supporting regulatory and compliance requirements.

ZM: Customers have become comfortable with interacting with chatbots and can use chatbots to interact with banks while completing other tasks. But, some chatbots remain rules-based and cannot address more complex questions. This is where generative AI can help customers get the answers they need. It excels in finding answers in vast amounts of data, summarising them, and assisting live customer agents or supporting existing AI chatbots.

In addition to the need for advanced AI technology to improve the chatbot experience, another factor that must be considered in the equation as more banking moves online is that of the customer agent. Live customer agents will continue to play an important role in helping customers with complex transactions.

A good example of this in practice is Discover Financial Services. Discover Financial Services is using Google Clouds AI platform, Vertex AI, to empower its nearly 10,000 contact center agents with generative AI-driven tools with capabilities that can help analyse and summarise complex policies and procedures, providing agents with information at their fingertips to answer customer needs. The platform is also providing agents with natural language real-time search assistance to give them access to vast knowledge bases they can refer to during live interactions, enabling them to provide consumers with a superior customer experience.

ZM: According to Google Clouds banking survey, the next generation of banking consumers are comfortable with AI and emerging cloud technology. 45% of millennials and Gen Z respondents aged 18-44 said they were either somewhat comfortable or very comfortable with gen AI-powered applications if they provided better customer experiences.

We are moving to a stage of adoption where consumers are embracing technology that makes their everyday life easier. According to the survey, AI-driven experiences such as smarter, more helpful AI chatbots (20%), faster and automated credit card application and approval (18%), and a 360-degree view of financial portfolios (16%) were among the top experiences that consumers of all age groups would like to see their banks improve or add. We think this sentiment will continue to increase as banks roll out more personalised experiences.

ZM: Google Cloud is making significant investments in the financial services industry vertical. Our goal is to make Google Cloud the platform of choice for the financial services industry. We are combining the same globally scalable Google infrastructure and technology that powers Search, YouTube, Gmail and others with the specialised capabilities of the worlds leading financial services firm. At the core these services are powered by secure and sustainable infrastructure, data analytics, and AI and machine learning.

We work with financial services companies across the banking, capital markets, insurance, and payments industries. We signed several partnerships and expanded existing ones with firms including Wells Fargo, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, KeyBank, ScotiaBank, TD Bank, Arvest Bank, PayPal, Global Payments, Coinbase and more.

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Interview: Google Cloud's Zac Maufe on the use of Cloud Services in the banking industry - Retail Banker International

Fear of AI-powered attacks has some organizations concerned about their cloud security postures, according to a Palo Alto Networks report published Wednesday.

The report, titled "The State of Cloud Native Security," includes the results of a survey of 2,800-plus infosec professionals who self-reported as knowledgeable of their organization's cloud infrastructure or cloud security and were either executive leadership or relevant security, IT or development practitioners.

Some of the most notable findings in the survey involved generative AI, a technology that has continued its ascent in the public consciousness since OpenAI launched ChatGPT to the public in fall 2022. According to the report, 43% of respondents predicted AI-powered threats will evade traditional defense techniques to become a more common threat vector, while 38% of respondents ranked AI-powered attacks as a top cloud security concern.

Perhaps more surprising results were related to the biggest concerns in cloud security from a threat perspective. Risks introduced by AI-generated code came in first place with 44%, while AI-powered attacks in third. Recent research has shown that generative AI tools such as GitHub Copilot can replicate vulnerabilities and insecure code in existing code bases.

Meanwhile, API risks came in second, inadequate access management came in fourth, and unknown/unmanaged assets came in seventh. This is all despite many experts who say generative AI is a nascent tool in the threat landscape, while the listed non-AI issues are resulting in swaths of cyberattacks here and now.

To this point, Palo Alto reported that cloud security incidents were on the rise, with data breaches reported by 64% of organizations. Forty-eight percent of organizations reported an increase in compliance violations, 46% reported having insecure APIs and 45% reported operational downtime caused by misconfiguration.

Amol Mathur, senior vice president and general manager of Prisma Cloud at Palo Alto Networks, told TechTarget Editorial that customers' concerns regarding AI threats speaks to the emerging nature of generative AI technology.

"The sense I get is that they're not saying that these issues are less important than AI threats," Mathur said. "It's more that people are more fearful of things they don't truly understand. When it comes to misconfigurations, identity, vulnerabilities, they have good programs and tools in place to give them the visibility and orchestration and so on. AI is an area that most people just don't understand the potential impact."

The report stated that 100% of surveyed organizations embraced AI-assisted coding to some extent. Mathur said that while generative AI can allow organizations to code and innovate faster, the use of AI in development has already led to vulnerabilities and poorly written code.

IBM and Amazon Web Services published a joint report last Monday at RSA Conference 2024. They found that while 82% of surveyed C-suite executives acknowledged the importance of trustworthy and secure AI, only 24% included a security component in their generative AI-related products.

"The question is, do people understand that just because it's generated by AI doesn't mean that it's secure?" Mathur said. "It's one thing when you're using a model or an app from a very well-established firm out there, though even that could go wrong. But there are also open source LLMs out there. People are using all sorts of stuff. What [is] that LLM trained on? Sure, you can move fast. You can get all this this software out quickly. But what's the risk?"

Mathur said cloud-centric defenders on a whole are getting better at avoiding issues such as identity threats and misconfigurations. But he also said those problems remain common, and there's still a long way to go.

"There are still organizations using fragmented visibility and fragmented tools that don't share context and don't talk to each other," he said. "It has gotten better, but these issues have not gone away. We still see a ton of issues in data, identity and misconfiguration."

Alexander Culafi is a senior information security news writer and podcast host for TechTarget Editorial.

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AI-driven attacks seen as chief cloud security threat - TechTarget

In the rapidly evolving world of technology, cloud computing is a beacon of innovation and efficiency for businesses and individuals. As we leverage the clouds vast capabilities, robust security measures have never been more critical. For organizations looking to stay ahead of cloud security threats and vulnerabilities, companies like DoiT International are highly sought after to help ensure proper security protocols are in place. In this post, well delve into the latest trends in cloud security, discussing how cutting-edge technology and strategic design are pivotal in safeguarding digital assets.

The shift to the Zero Trust architecture is the most apparent among the significant cloud security changes. Another drawback of regular security tactics is that they usually consider anything inside the system safe, which is sometimes a fact. Whereas traditional networks are built on the principle of trust, assuming it should be granted to devices situated inside the networks perimeter so that the networks users dont need to verify their position each time, zero-trust approaches challenge this notion by enforcing strict identity verification for every person and device, regardless of whether they are inside or outside the networks perimeter. The methodology protects against any threat arising within the organization or network because every access request is validated as if it came from an external network.

This approach is very similar to the least privilege principle, in which no one or nothing will have access to resources beyond the scope of their specified job function. A Zero Trust architecture model calls for scrupulous planning and mapping to define network access protocols and include more progressive and comprehensive elements of identity and access management. Today, more and more enterprises are integrating this approach into their security measures to ensure that unauthorized access to an organizations and its networks sensitive data against outside attacks is effectively eliminated.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are proving increasingly significant in ensuring the security of the cloud environment. Such tools detect any oddness that excites concern and can accomplish that quickly compared to traditional processes. AI technologies operating as security systems can use a lot of data to create a chart that will indicate security breaches, which usually look like unusual login locations or access privileges about to change abruptly.

In addition, machine intelligence algorithms can learn from every single bot before finally adapting to brand-new threats. The upshot is that the systems cybersecurity specialists can stay ahead of the cyber hoods that change tactics frequently and develop better ways of exploiting known vulnerabilities. Integrating AI and ML into the security infrastructures of the CSPs can help them provide defenses that can escape reproaches of being only proactive against future attacks.

Since cloud technology is influencing our activities, the regulators have no choice but to state the compliance and privacy issues. That is not to say, however, that the trend could be more generally discernible in the design of legislation, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States. These rules outline information regulations, which they reinforce by setting strong data protection standards and forcing companies to be transparent in what they do with users privacy.

Thus, Cloud service providers must build in compliance with various these and other regulatory requirements, which mostly require a team of lawyers and technical specialists to work closely together. Nevertheless, those regulatory requirements have a considerable role to play in developing user confidence and in helping to avoid heavy under-compensation sanctions. The trend to tighten regulations has been driving cloud computing enterprises in the preparation of the architecture and operational plans that include privacy and data protection.

Along with the continued development of cloud computing, so is the case of cloud security predicaments, which also keep growing in complexity. There are bound to be many new forms of trends in cloud security, and here Id like to tackle the three driving the current course towards the new age of cloud security Zero trust architectures, integration of AI and ML, and stringent compliance with privacy regulations. It goes without saying that for businesses and individuals, it is indispensable to have a full overview and proper use of these trends to create a safe and effective use of cloud technologies. Innovation is no longer just a demand fulfiller but a problem solver, providing solutions to current and future security problems in the digital spaces for the safety of all users.

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Exploring the Latest Security Trends in Cloud Computing - iLounge

Appian CorpAPPNreported fiscal first-quarter 2024 revenue growth of 11% year-on-year to $149.84 million, marginally beating theanalyst consensus of $149.76 million.

AdjustedEPS loss of 24 cents missed theanalyst consensus loss of 16 cents.Thestock price plunged close to 20%after the results.

Total subscription revenue increased 19% year over year to $117.7 million.Professional services revenue was $32.1 million, down 11% year over year.

Outlook:Appian expects second-quarter revenue of $140.00 million $144.00million, up by 10%13% Y/Y against theconsensus of $145.25 million. It projects an adjusted EPS loss of 34 cents to 28 cents versus the 0.29 cents consensus loss.

Thecompany reiterated fiscal 2024revenue of $615.00 million $617.00 million, up by 13% Y/Y, below the consensus of $615.75 million. It projects adjusted EPS loss of $(0.85) $(0.79) (prior $(0.73) $(0.66)), against theconsensus loss of $(0.68).

Appianstock gained over 1% in the last 12 months. Investors can gain exposure to the stock viaFirst Trust Nasdaq Artificial Intelligence And Robotics ETFROBT andFirst Trust Cloud Computing ETFSKYY.

Price Action:APPN shares traded lower by 20.10% at $29.35 onthe last check Thursday.

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2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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Cloud Computing Firm Appian Stock Nosedives After Q1 Print, What's Going On? - Appian (NASDAQ:APPN) - Benzinga