At this year’s Google Cloud Next 2026 conference in Las Vegas, tech and cybersecurity companies across the channel unveiled their latest announcements spanning AI, security, infrastructure, and more.
While artificial intelligence was firmly front and center, themes around enhanced cybersecurity, particularly AI guardrails and cyber resilience, emerged as equally important priorities.
In this recap, we break down some of the key stories from Google’s flagship event.
Netskope unveils AI Guardrails solution powered by Google Cloud
Netskope, a security and networking provider, has announced an expanded partnership with Google Cloud to deliver enhanced performance and security for AI workflows.
The new solution leverages Netskope One AI Guardrails to help enterprises deploy high-performance generative AI and agentic workflows at scale on Google Cloud.
As organizations adopt autonomous AI agents, Netskope highlighted the growing need for real-time, agent-native protection.
Netskope One AI Security gains data security solutions
As part of Netskope One AI Security, Netskope One AI Guardrails is designed to protect data, mitigate AI-specific threats, and support responsible AI use through content moderation.
“Netskope and Google Cloud’s collaboration helps bring the best of AI innovation from Google Cloud and enterprise security from Netskope,” said Vineet Bhan, director of security and identity partnerships at Google.
“Netskope One AI Guardrails works with Vertex AI and TPUs to enable the secure deployment of both generative AI and autonomous agents. Together, we are helping organizations build the future of their business on a foundation of trust.”
Key benefits from the solution include:
- Hardware-accelerated responsible AI: With Google Cloud Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), Netskope aligns with cost-efficient, high-throughput inference infrastructure, helping ensure security keeps pace with the fastest AI workloads.
- Enablement for secure agentic and generative AI ecosystems: Secures autonomous agents, ensuring that when an agent calls a tool, interacts with an MCP server, or executes an autonomous task, every step is verified against enterprise policy in real-time.
- Real-time behavioral protection against AI threats: Proactively identifies and blocks AI-specific threats, including prompt injection and jailbreaking, before they can compromise model integrity.
- Native data sovereignty and compliance: Enables organizations to meet stringent requirements such as GDPR, HIPAA, and the EU AI Act by enforcing consistent policies across all AI communications.
Rubrik expands cyber resilience and agent governance
Security and AI operations company Rubrik made two key announcements during Google Cloud Next: its release of new cyber resilience capabilities for Google Cloud SQL organizations and the launch of its Rubric Agent Cloud (RAC) for Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.
Cyber resilience for Google Cloud SQL organizations
Rubrik is now offering cyber resilience capabilities to organizations running Google Cloud SQL.
This enables Cloud SQL customers to leverage Rubrik Security Cloud to protect their managed PostgreSQL databases with immutable, automated backups that add Rubrik’s enterprise-grade cyber resilience without disrupting their current database operations or recovery strategy.
“Organizations shouldn’t have to choose between cyber resilience and disaster recovery,” said Anneka Gupta, chief product officer at Rubrik. “With Google Cloud, we’re giving our joint customers immutable backups that work alongside their existing disaster recovery strategy, so they can meet compliance requirements, protect against threats, and recover fast, all without changing their architecture,” Gupta continued.
Key Features with Rubrik Security Cloud for Google Cloud SQL:
- Unified cyber resilience: Manage Cloud SQL protection alongside Google Workspace, Google Compute Engine, and Google Kubernetes Engine from a single interface.
- Automated discovery and protection: Automatically discover new Cloud SQL instances and apply global policies.
- Backup without tradeoffs: Delivers immutable backups that add enterprise-grade cyber resilience without disrupting existing database operations or disaster recovery strategies.
- Storage class flexibility: Choose Google Cloud Storage Archive, Coldline, or Nearline for backups to align cost with actual usage.
Rubrik Agent Cloud for Gemini Enterprise: Securing AI Agents on Google Cloud
Rubrik also launched Rubrik Agent Cloud (RAC) for the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.
The collaboration aims to help organizations accelerate and secure the deployment of AI agents on Google Cloud by providing a critical layer of semantic governance and operational resilience, powered by Rubrik’s real-time, intent-based guardrails.
At a time when task-specific AI agents are rapidly proliferating, the partnership gives customers running Google Cloud-built autonomous agents access to Rubrik capabilities to monitor, govern, and instantly remediate AI actions.
RAC is powered by Rubrik’s Semantic AI Governance Engine (SAGE), a leading data security AI governance engine designed to maintain full control over agent behavior—featuring the industry’s only “rewind” capability to undo mistakes.
Organizations using the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform can leverage these core Rubrik capabilities:
- SAGE: An AI governance engine designed to secure and control autonomous agents in real time, offering intent-driven governance to safely scale the enterprise AI workforce while maintaining comprehensive control over agent behavior.
- Agent Inventory: Autodiscover agents running on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform Runtime with 360° visibility into risk, access permissions, and policy violations.
- Agent Rewind: Instantly and precisely undo an autonomous agent’s destructive action.
- Unified AI Control Pane: Integrates with Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, enabling administrators to manage AI security policies from the same Rubrik platform as Google Workspace and hybrid cloud data.
Commvault and Clumio target cloud recovery needs
Meanwhile, cyber resilience company Commvault has announced that its Commvault Cloud platform is now available on the Google Cloud Marketplace.
The move aims to address the rising resilience gap faced by organizations. In particular, Commvault cited the lack of confidence organizations have in their ability to recover systems and data following a hypothetical cyber incident.
“As AI accelerates the pace of transformation, the stakes for keeping data and workloads resilient in the cloud have never been higher,” said Michelle Graff, senior vice president of global partners & channel sales at Commvault.
“By expanding the full breadth of the Commvault Cloud platform to Google Cloud, we are giving cloud-first and multi-cloud organizations choice, the ability to innovate with confidence, and access to proven resilience.”
Some of the platform capabilities that come with Commvault Cloud on Google Cloud include:
- Resilience for modern workloads: End-to-end protection and resilience for workloads like BigQuery, Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Cloud SQL, as well as Google Workspace workloads, including Gmail and Google Drive.
- Advanced security and threat hunting: Commvault Cloud Threat Scan helps organizations search backups for known threats, recover validated clean data, and reduce reinfection risks.
- Automated protection recommendations: Automatically finds workloads across Google Cloud and recommends protection policies based on workload classification.
- Cloud data risk analysis: Analyzes discovered cloud resources for protection risk, and reports enable administrators to see protected versus under-protected workloads.
Commvault also announced that Clumio, a Commvault company, is extending its cloud-native cyber resilience capabilities to Google Cloud Storage, bringing these capabilities to multi-cloud environments.
This enables organizations to protect and recover large-scale cloud data and AI workloads with greater simplicity.
Commvault says the move is driven by strong customer demand, enabling businesses using Google Cloud Storage to leverage Clumio to protect and recover large-scale datasets powering AI and analytics workloads.
As a fully managed SaaS platform, Clumio provides isolated, immutable backups stored in an air-gapped vault separate from primary data. This is critical because if primary data is compromised or held for ransom, the air-gapped backups remain secure.
The approach also helps protect against accidental deletion and operational errors without requiring organizations to deploy or manage backup infrastructure.
“With Clumio now expanding to Google Cloud, we are enabling more customers to bring resilience to datasets that are powering today’s AI transformation. This gives organizations confidence that no matter how or where disruption happens, they can recover,” said Woon Ho Jung, chief technology officer at Clumio.
Exabeam extends agent behavior analytics to Google ecosystem
Exabeam, a cybersecurity company specializing in behavior intelligence for the agentic enterprise, has announced new Exabeam Agent Behavior Analytics (ABA) capabilities for agents built with Google Cloud’s Agent Development Kit (ADK).
The company also unveiled a new integration framework with Google Agent Gateway, positioning Exabeam at the forefront of enterprise security as enterprises adopt agentic workflows.
The update extends Exabeam ABA across the Google agent ecosystem, including Gemini Enterprise, custom-built agents, and multi-agent workflows.
To address limited visibility into autonomous agents, Exabeam ABA delivers unified visibility, behavior baselining, anomaly detection, and cross-agent correlation—helping detect and investigate risks across both individual agents and multi-agent environments.
“Agentic AI represents a fundamental shift in how applications are built and operated,” said Steve Wilson, Chief AI and product officer at Exabeam.
“By extending our Agent Behavior Analytics to include agents developed with Google Cloud’s Agent Development Kit, we are enabling security teams to maintain trust and visibility across the full lifecycle of intelligent agents.”
Bottom line from Google Cloud: guardrails and cyber resilience
With these announcements from Google Cloud, two key themes stand out: the implementation of AI guardrails and enhanced cyber resilience for organizations.
With rapid AI adoption among businesses, the race is now on to enable secure AI without stifling innovation. This covers both initial implementation and ongoing visibility, particularly as AI agents become more widespread.
The rise of AI has also made cyber resilience a critical focus, as organizations do not want to fall behind in preparing for potential cyber incidents or AI-induced attacks.
For MSPs and channel partners, it’s clear that the conversation is now centered on who can enable customers to securely use AI—and who can protect and recover against this more complex status quo.
