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Google yesterday (23 July) inaugurated a new business service in Malaga city called Cloud Space at its offices in Paseo de la Farola. This branch of service provision is dedicated to hosting meetings with Google's big customers - both companies and government bodies - in which the provider will share the latest innovations of its cloud security division and address specific customer needs and problems. It is the seventh Cloud Space to be opened by Google in the world, the fourth in Europe, but it is the first and only one dedicated 100% to cybersecurity - a major coup for Malaga.
As a result, this Cloud Space now operates alongside the Security Engineering Centre (known by its acronym GSEC), which has been operating for a year now and was officially inaugurated in November. Both are located at Google's Malaga headquarters. Malaga is now not only a hub for the development of cybersecurity technology, but also the company's main customer meeting-point in this area of tech support.
Yesterday and today more than one hundred customers and managers of the multinational itself have descended on Malaga from different parts of the world to attend this launch event. The director of Google Cloud Security in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Cristina Pitarch, views the choice of Malaga for this new Cloud Space as "a triumph worth celebrating", because it is "something that is very limited edition: in the last three or four years Google has not given any permissions to open a centre of this type and practically all of Google's European offices were clamouring for it, but the only one that has been approved is the one in Malaga." It is a new milestone, she stresses, to move towards the goal of Malaga becoming "the place people think of when they want to learn about the latest trends in cybersecurity."
Google's other Cloud Spaces are in New York, Silicon Valley, London, Singapore, Munich and Paris. Pitarch gives more details: "It's a space where we can bring companies and public sector representatives to what we call Enterprise Business Meetings: we sit down together, analyse the problems they have and what they want to do and show them the latest in cybersecurity and threats. It's very important for customers because they get a chance to see and try out first-hand the new things that Google is doing, and it's very important for us because it's good for us to listen to them."
Malaga has played its cards right to get this Cloud Space. The first ace is the attractiveness of the city itself: "Nobody says no to coming to Malaga", says Cristina Pitarch. The second ace is having the GSEC itself already in Malaga. The GSEC team has played a leading role in the innovations that Google has launched this year in cybersecurity, such as Google Threat Intelligence, its new platform for defence and prevention against cyber-attacks.
Now one year after starting up, Google's Malaga office already employs 70 people with space for 30 more. This 100 staff capacity is a ceiling that Pitarch believes will be reached in two years, and after that: "If things continue to work so well, we'll have to keep betting on Malaga."
The catastrophe caused by the failed update of CrowdStrike is the first question that springs to mind when sitting in front of someone like Cristina Pitarch as she is in charge of Google Cloud Security's business in the EMEA nations. The computer blackout that put companies, airports, hospitals and banks around the world in check last Friday has highlighted both the risks of excessive concentration in the cybersecurity market and the fragility of the digital society itself. Pitarch assures us that Google is involved in "helping to resolve not just the incident, but what comes after it, which is all the fraud attempts that try to take advantage of the situation." But then she waves the flag for what her company can do better: in her opinion, what happened last Friday shows that cloud services "are more secure" than on-site services. "Being in the cloud would have prevented a lot of these problems."
Pitarch is confident that the CrowdStrike "catastrophe" will have a positive outcome: it will help raise awareness among businesses and the general public alike that cyber-incidents - this one was not an attack, but a software design flaw - have real consequences. Some of those consequences were as real as not being able to undergo surgery, not catching a flight nor withdrawing cash from an ATM cash machine. Google's management team added: "It's a message we've been repeating for years: the question is not if you're going to be attacked, it's when you're going to be attacked."
Assuming that no antivirus can stop all threats (as the first vulnerability factor is human error), Pitarch said the strategy should be geared more towards becoming more resilient: "You have to be prepared so that if you have an incident, instead of taking two days to get back to normal, it just takes one hour. Any type of company, organisation, retail business... should have a plan, adapted to its size and the complexity of its business, to be able to react to this type of situation. And I can tell you that not all of them do."
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