Google Cloud Security – What You Need to Know
For many organizations, security is one of the key factors that influence their adoption of the cloud and the speed at which this occurs. As one of the world’s leading cloud services providers, Google Cloud knows this and has put together a strong lineup of security solutions. So, what can you expect from Google Cloud security? Read on to find out.
Google Cloud Security Solutions
Google Cloud offers several powerful security solutions for protecting your cloud applications, data, and user accounts and stay safe from fraud. Let’s take a closer look at some of the essential Google Cloud security solutions available right now.
- Security Command Center – The Google Cloud Security Command Center protects your Google Cloud assets through advanced threat detection and protection including asset inventory. It’s the go-to platform for checking your Google Cloud security at a glance to ensure that everything is running according to plan.
- Chronicle – Chronicle is a security analytics and operations service that enables you to analyze petabytes of data. Chronicle uses an advanced rules engine and intelligent data fusion to identify threats. It’s capable of retrospective analysis and provides scalable elastic storage which allows you to handle huge amounts of data.
- WAAP – An acronym for Web App and API Protection, WAAP is another essential Google Cloud security solution you need to know. With WAAP, you can protect your web apps and APIs from security threats. This solution works not only in the Google Cloud but also in hybrid and on-premise deployments.
- Secret Manager – Keeping your certificates, passwords, and API keys safe is essential to maintaining security in the cloud, and Secret Manager enables you to store all of these in a secure environment. It’s fairly easy to use as well.
- Identity-Aware Proxy – Identity-Aware Proxy enables you to centralize access control to apps and virtual machines and protect them through identity and context security rules. Similar to WAAP, this security feature also works with on-premise apps.
- Resource Manager – The Google Cloud Resource Manager enables you to manage and control cloud resources. It’s a powerful and accessible feature that simplifies cloud management.
- Shielded VMs – One of the highlights of the Google Cloud security solutions is the Shielded VMs product, which protects virtual machines from malicious attacks and tampering. If you plan on setting up and managing multiple virtual machines in the Google Cloud, this is one feature that can bring you peace of mind. Note that Google also offers a beta feature called Confidential VMs for real-time encryption of data in use.
- Web Risk – With Web Risk, your security team can detect unsafe URLs in client apps as well as on your website to ward off risks. The solution checks results against a constantly updated database of malicious URLs.
- Cloud Data Loss Prevention – With this security solution, you can discover and classify sensitive data, identify risks, and mask data to keep it safe.
- Firewalls – Like other top cloud computing platforms, Google Cloud also provides advanced firewalls that add another layer of defense between your cloud resources and potential threats. Features include hierarchical policies, VPC rules, and rules logging.
- Identity Platform – Google Cloud Identify Platform is an authentication as a service solution that enables you to safely manage access and identities for your cloud apps to prevent unauthorized access.
- VPC Service Controls – Planning on storing sensitive data in the Google Cloud? The VPC Service Controls lets you establish security perimeters and centrally manage access to services.
Google Cloud Security Overview
As you can see, Google Cloud offers solid security features that you can adapt to your needs. Depending on your organization’s cloud requirements, some of these features will be more relevant than others. Whether you have a dedicated security team maintaining your cloud security across services or only want essential access control and data protection, Google Cloud provides strong all-round protection that doesn’t leave any obvious gaps for data thefts or hackers to exploit.
