May is a big month for the security industry. It’s been over a year since we gathered for RSA in San Francisco for one of 2020’s last major in-person events. While we likely won’t be together in person this year, it’s an important time for the security community to come together and reflect on many accomplishments, and to consider the challenges still ahead of us. As the world focuses on security incidents and all the risks that still need resolving, it is important to stand back, on occasion, and also note that immense progress has been made by large numbers of small, medium and large enterprises to protect themselves and their customers against increased threats. What is also amazing is to see organizations do this while accelerating their digital transformations, supporting and protecting customers and managing ongoing remote working challenges. We are privileged to play our part in supporting those great teams. 

It’s also been a busy month for us here at Google Cloud since our inaugural CISO perspectives blog post in April. Today, I’ll recap our cloud security and industry highlights, a sneak peak of what’s ahead from Google at RSA and more. 

Thoughts from around the industry 

• Risk Governance of Digital Transformation in the Cloud – In our latest Office of the CISO whitepaper, we shared guidance on both the challenges and opportunities of cloud transformation for Chief Risk Officers, Chief Compliance Officers, Heads of Internal Audit and their teams. A misconception we sometimes see among these executives is that moving to the cloud creates more risk to manage. Having held these leadership positions in previous roles, I believe that the cloud is as much a means of managing security, resilience and other risks as it is a risk in its own right. The whitepaper dives deep into considerations for each of these leadership functions as their organization embarks on a digital transformation journey. 
• The importance of meeting global compliance requirements – Compliance is critical for building trust with customers in regulated industries, especially the public sector. It is worth remembering that in any critical industry, where there can be material impact from incidents, strong industry practices and standards to protect customers are vital (I wrote about this last summer). At Google Cloud, we’re regularly adding new compliance and security certifications to meet our customers’ needs globally. Recently, we expanded our list of FedRAMP High-certified products to include Cloud DNS, and helped our customers in the Asia-Pacific region address various compliance requirements to meet new government regulations for security and data protections. Google Cloud was also the only cloud service provider to complete an annual pooled audit with the Collaborative Cloud Audit Group (CCAG), which is a syndicate of 39 leading European financial institutions and insurance companies who depend on cloud infrastructure and technologies to deliver innovative solutions and experiences for their customers. Having spent most of my career in the financial services industry, I know firsthand the importance of managing risk assessments for outsourced vendors to provide the necessary assurances customers need from their cloud providers. 

RSA 2021 

We have a great lineup of speaking sessions and keynotes from Googlers at RSA this year. Below are the highlights you don’t want to miss: 

• I’ll be doing a session on May 20 about supply chain resilience, where a panel of experts will dive into how we can adjust risk and security initiatives to handle the next “punch to the supply chain.” Additionally, on May 18 I’ll join many of my esteemed CISO leaders from various industries and governments for a keynote discussion on our top security insights, lessons learned and best practices for how we move forward as an industry to address the next wave of challenges. 
• Google’s Senior Director of Information Security Heather Adkins will deliver a session on how to build secure and reliable systems at scale, which will cover principles from Google’s Site Reliability Engineering book with the same title (available for free download here). I’m most looking forward to Heather’s advice for how we as an industry can reshape our security thinking, based on modern architectures and technologies that can help organizations design scalable and reliable systems that are fundamentally secure.
• Nelly Porter, Senior Product Manager at Google Cloud Security, will participate in a panel discussion with security experts on the importance of Confidential Computing technology, how it’s changing the security landscape and where it’s headed. Google Cloud has made great progress in delivering a Confidential Computing portfolio for our customers in regulated industries over the past year, and we’re excited for new milestones in 2021. 

Google cloud security highlights

• Infrastructure and SRE spotlight – Before I joined Google Cloud, I always admired the infrastructure and benefits this organization delivers that are uniquely Google – from the subsea cable innovations to SRE inventions and principles. Security and resiliency are baked into every layer of our infrastructure. Many of the Googlers who build and support our platform have sat in the same seat as our customers, so they understand those needs intimately. Over the last few months it’s been amazing to watch our technical infrastructure team grow, and the direct reliability, operational resilience and security benefits that team brings to our customers. For example, we’ve opened a new region in Poland, announced the first subsea cable that will directly connect the U.S. to Singapore with fiber pairs over an express route, and released an SRE book focused on how organizations can complete a successful cloud migration.
• New security foundations blueprint guide – As part of our mission to deliver the industry’s most trusted cloud, we strive to operate in a shared-fate model for risk management in conjunction with our customers. This includes sharing opinionated step-by-step guidance with key decision points and focus areas for how our customers deploy workloads in Google Cloud. This is why we’ve updated our Google Cloud security foundations guide and corresponding Terraform blueprint scripts. These blueprints are tremendously helpful to many stakeholders within an enterprise, like a CISO that needs to understand our key principles for cloud security, or a C-Suite business leader that needs to quickly identify the skills their teams need to meet an organization’s security, risk, and compliance needs on Google Cloud. 

When we think about the types of features to build into products, we have many principles we follow. But the two that I keep coming back to as crucial are:

1. The need for secure products not just security products. All products should have security built in and while we do build great security products our security and other teams remain focused on constantly enhancing the base levels of security and the security features in all our products. 
2. Defense in Depth. We don’t just focus on defense in depth from attacks – for ourselves and our customers. We also prioritize defense in depth from configuration errors or other hazards. 

As you see below in some of the highlights of new features and products, these represent our commitment to secure products and all forms of defense in depth. 

• Workload identity federation – Service account keys are powerful credentials, and can represent a security risk if they are not managed correctly. A safer approach is to use workload identity federation, using IAM to grant external identities IAM roles, including the ability to impersonate service accounts. This lets you access resources directly and eliminates the maintenance and security burden associated with service account keys. We also offered related overall guidance on the best way to use and authenticate service accounts on Google Cloud.
• VPC-SC Directional Policies – With VPC Service Controls (VPC-SC), admins can define a security perimeter around Google-managed services to control communication to and between those services. Using VPC-SC, you can isolate your production GCP resources from unauthorized VPC networks or the internet. But what if you need to transfer data between isolated environments that you’ve set up? VPC-SC directional policies is a new secure data exchange feature that allows you to configure efficient, private, and secure data exchange between isolated environments. 
• Anthos service mesh supports VMs as well as clusters – Most enterprise compute resources are still in VMs and many will remain there for a long time to come. In Anthos 1.7,  your VM-based workloads can now take advantage of the same mesh functionality as your container-based workloads.
• Cloud Spanner CMEK and Access Approvals – Cloud Spanner is Google Cloud’s fully managed relational database that offers unlimited scale, high performance, strong consistency across regions and high availability. Spanner now supports customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) and Access Approval, Google Cloud’s industry-leading controls to require approval before access to your content by Google support and engineering teams.
• External Key Manager enhancements – In early 2020 we launched Cloud External Key Manager (Cloud EKM), the industry’s leading Hold-Your-Own-Key (HYOK) product. Using Cloud EKM, the keys used to protect your data stored and processed in Google Cloud are completely hosted and managed outside of Google Cloud infrastructure. Cloud EKM initially launched with support for BigQuery and GCE/PD;  we expanded support for Cloud SQL, GKE, Dataflow Shuffle, and Secret Manager, with CMEK support currently in beta. We also provided in-depth documentation on the functionality, architecture and use cases for Cloud EKM in a new whitepaper.
• Web App and API Protection solution –  Web applications and public APIs are increasingly important to how organizations interface with their customers and partners, and we’ve seen increased investment in tools to protect these resources from fraud and abuse. Google Cloud’s new Web App and API protection solution is based on the same technology Google uses to protect its public-facing services against web application exploits, DDoS attacks, fraudulent bot activity, and API targeted threats. It provides protection across clouds and on-premises environments.
• Threat Intel for Chronicle – Most threat intelligence feeds require security teams to do the implementation and legwork. With our new Threat Intel for Chronicle offering, however, our intelligence insights are applied automatically across your security telemetry to present unique observations within your environment. Threat Intel for Chronicle is exclusively curated for enterprise customers by Uppercase, Google Cloud’s intelligence research and applications team to provide our perspective on threats across the internet and surface them as relevant alerts.

That wraps up another month of thoughts and highlights. If you’d like to have this Cloud CISO Perspectives post delivered every month to your inbox, click here to sign-up, and we’ll see you in June!

In May, the White House issued an Executive Order aiming to improve the nation’s cybersecurity defenses and requiring US Federal agencies to develop plans to implement Zero Trust architectures in alignment with National Institute of Standards and Technology National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidance. This Executive Order also calls on agencies to accelerate cloud adoption, with a preference for cloud capabilities that implement or advance the adoption of Zero Trust. 

Zero Trust moves front and center 

The White House guidance is timely and necessary given the surge of ransomware and other cyber attacks over the past year targeting remote workers and VPNs, software supply chains, identity infrastructure and email, and various critical infrastructure sectors. These attacks have raised concerns about cyber-risk across the board, including pervasive IT monocultures that persist, unquestioned, despite their exploitability by attackers. 

This order ties together multiple strands of US cybersecurity best practices and policy that have evolved over the past decade, including stronger identity and access controls, expanded use of encryption and authentication, increased monitoring and visibility, and prioritizing high-value IT assets. Yet the urgent challenge of cybersecurity requires more than simply adding to the existing proliferation of cyber tools or ratcheting up traditional measures around hygiene and compliance. The Administration’s focus on Zero Trust marks a critical shift to prioritizing architectures in which the strategic coordination of layered cyber defenses drives improved cyber outcomes.  

In many ways then, the demand for accelerating the adoption of Zero Trust in federal IT is not a new requirement, as departments and agencies are already implementing many of the core technical components that can contribute to achieving the goals laid out in the executive order.  

What is new, however, is the fact that Zero Trust, when done right, is primarily an outcomes-oriented approach to security. Successfully implementing Zero Trust can drive down cyber risk, transform the daily security experience of users, reduce management complexity and toil for IT managers, and improve the overall productivity of the workforce. 

Outcomes, not just technology 

Successfully implementing Zero Trust is not about the individual technology components and inputs themselves.  Instead, what matters most is how security components are integrated and orchestrated to achieve and enforce a simple set of core principles: 

• Connecting from a particular network must not determine which services you can access
• Access to services and data is granted based on what we know about you and your device
• All access to services must be authenticated, authorized and encrypted.  

Using this set of principles as our north star, Google began our Zero Trust journey, with BeyondCorp, over a decade ago, under similar circumstances to those driving federal cybersecurity policy now. Google had been targeted by nation-state cyber attacks (Operation Aurora), and in the aftermath, we recognized that providing remote access with VPNs was not sustainable or efficient for business performance, especially at a time when Google’s global workforce was growing rapidly. Something had to change.

To improve our security posture and user experience, we had to reimagine our infrastructure and production networks. This ultimately drove innovations in how we protect our supply chains and resulted in a complete rethinking of the scale, analytics and visibility needed to fully modernize and transform enterprise security. The journey forced us to consolidate redundant systems, understand usage patterns better, and transform how people experience security day to day.

A shift in technology and a change in mindset

When we developed BeyondCorp, we had to reimagine our infrastructure and production networks in order to affect a better security posture and user experience. This ultimately drove innovations in how we protect our supply chains and resulted in a complete rethinking of the scale, analytics and visibility needed to fully modernize and transform enterprise security. 

Moving to a Zero Trust approach drastically changed how Google’s end users did business and reduced the toil on both individual users and IT professionals to do their part to secure the enterprise, further fostering  the innovation, architectures, operational integrations and best practices we see today. Now, the layered defenses and invisible security our users experience have been incorporated into Google’s secure cloud offerings, so our customers can experience the same benefits and provide their users with a secure and productive work environment. 

Leadership for a cross-team journey

Of course, change isn’t trivial, especially in government. A shift in behavior, user experience, collaboration, tools and infrastructure requires planning, change management, and executive support.  To make the Zero Trust journey a success, organizations need the long-term focus and vision of leadership to drive meaningful change. For traditional security and technology leaders, accelerating the journey to Zero Trust will require them to think less tactically and and act more strategically, in order to focus more on outcomes and less on inputs, and to integrate, harmonize, orchestrate and automate what were previously standalone IT and security efforts.  For non-technology leaders, their engagement and leadership is essential – and much more likely – given the visible benefits to collaboration, culture, and the business from what could otherwise be seen as a technology-centric initiative.      

Done right, Zero Trust brings a sea change from how most people experience security.  The crossroads of the Zero Trust journey present organizations with two clear choices: stick with an old and not-so-secure security model that’s clunky and burdensome, or adopt a new model that’s more intuitive, easy, and secure.  

Jump start your own journey

Today, the same opportunity exists to transform government security, operations, and organizational models by implementing Zero Trust. By sharing lessons learned from Google’s BeyondCorp journey and building core security capabilities into many of our cloud products, our goal is to help government agencies  accelerate their own Zero Trust journey, transforming the security posture of their highest value and most-critical applications and data.  

To learn more, watch our on-demand sessions from the Google Cloud Government Security Summit,

About the authors

Dan Prieto previously served in the White House as Director for Cybersecurity Policy on the staff of the National Security Council.  He also served as CTO and Director of the Defense Industrial Base Cybersecurity Program in the Office of the Department of Defense CIO.

Max Saltonstall tells stories about Google Cloud, how we use similar Cloudy tools inside Google, and what diverse solutions Cloud’s many customers have created. At Google he’s worked within DoubleClick, Corporate Engineering, Staffing and the Cloud CTO Office.

At AirAsia, we operate a fleet of more than 270 aircraft across 23 markets, fly to more than 150 destinations and carry 100m guests each year. We’ve also been named the world’s best low-cost carrier for 11 years running. To accomplish all of this, we rely heavily on our 22,000 Allstars (employees). As AirAsia co-founder Tony Fernandes likes to say, “it has always been about the people.”

With Cloud Identity in place, our IT department can spend less time worrying about managing multiple on-premises directory servers and and can instead focus on delivering value to our Allstar employees.
–Declan Hogan, Group CIO, AirAsia

In my role as CIO, it’s critical that I give our Allstars the tools and technology they need to get their jobs done, while at the same time ensuring that our company’s data is protected and secure. While this is challenging enough in normal circumstances, we’re also in the midst of rapidly moving from legacy on-premises technologies to the cloud. Google Cloud has been a critical partner for us in this journey.

Identity Challenges

AirAsia, like many other enterprises, has relied on a legacy on-premises directory for many years. As our company has quickly grown and expanded to new markets and regions, we’ve had to manage multiple servers across a number of on-premises data centers and the public cloud, which has proved costly and time-consuming.

Our Allstars, located all across Asia, need to easily access a number of legacy on-premises apps in addition to a growing number of SaaS apps. As a business, we also needed a more seamless integration between our HR system of record and our identity solution for user provisioning and lifecycle management.

Deploying Cloud Identity is a key step towards enabling the BeyondCorp (or zero trust) security model, which we feel is the best approach to strengthen our security posture and fight modern threats.
–Declan Hogan, Group CIO, AirAsia

Solving these challenges with our existing on-premises directory was simply not feasible for us.

In recent years, we partnered with Google Cloud to help drive our digital transformation, including moving dozens of workloads and apps to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), deploying G Suite as our collaboration and productivity solution for all of our employees, and replacing thousands of Windows laptops with fast and secure Chromebooks.

We brought up our identity concerns with the Google Cloud team, and after a number of conversations, we decided to deploy Cloud Identity, Google’s cloud-based identity and access management solution, to help address the identity challenges we were facing.

Why Cloud Identity for AirAsia?

We ended up choosing Cloud Identity for a few key reasons. Here at AirAsia, we are eager to move to the cloud as quickly as possible, and moving identity management to the cloud is a key enabler of this and our broader digital transformation. Managing identities from the cloud also enables us to have a single identity and set of credentials for each employee, which they can use to access all of the applications they need to be productive, both in the cloud and on-premises.

In addition, deploying Cloud Identity is a key step towards enabling the BeyondCorp (or zero trust) security model, which we feel is the best approach to strengthen our security posture and fight modern threats.

Cloud Identity also integrates seamlessly with our existing technologies, which includes not only Google Cloud products like GCP, G Suite, and Chrome OS, but also third party tools like Citrix, Papercut, and others.

And finally, Cloud Identity offered us significant cost and resource savings. With Cloud Identity in place, our IT department can spend less time worrying about managing multiple on-premises directory servers and and can instead focus on delivering value to our Allstar employees.