Together we can solve for the future of cloud security. Join us to learn how you can stay ahead of the next generation of threats with Google Cloud – whether you need to keep your organization secure in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid environment. Get fresh insights from industry leaders and engage in interactive sessions that can help you solve your most critical security challenges. 

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The Security Summit is part of our digital Google Cloud Summit series. Check out the other events in the series to explore Google Cloud technology applications in various industries and dive into our latest digital innovations.Original air date:20 July 2021 21:30 Register to watch on demand.

Over the past decade, cybersecurity has posed an increasing risk for organizations. In fact, cyber incidents topped the recent Allianz Risk Barometer for only the second time in the survey’s history. The challenges in combating these risks only continue to grow. Adversaries tend to be agile and are consistently looking for new ways to land within your digital environments. They also drive attack vectors that work, which means enterprise risk leaders are now forced to look for new ways of securing infrastructure and data.

Cloud comes of age in the modern day cybersecurity threat landscape

When cloud, in its various delivery models, was first introduced, it didn’t fit neatly into the security frameworks that had seemingly protected networks for many decades. Public cloud was the answer to ongoing IT challenges: scale, resources, security capabilities, and budget cycle limitations. Now, public cloud is meeting the increasing challenge of implementing cybersecurity controls and frameworks that are capable of protecting today’s global enterprise.

Cloud adoption – with all its scale and redistribution of longstanding security paradigms – is the optimal choice for infrastructure and security, particularly as organizations grapple with the need to engage in digital transformation. We assert that successful digital transformation is impossible without incorporating the use of the scale, security architecture, and resiliency of the cloud.

Consequently, cloud adoption becomes a necessary component of roadmap discussions and planning as your organization looks to reduce overall risk. Risk leaders and enterprise cybersecurity leaders must consider that moving data, digital processes, and priority workloads to the public cloud is a crucial step for meeting the current and future digital needs of the enterprise. Going forward, this digital transformation increasingly will include hybrid infrastructure environments composed of a combination of on-premises and cloud solutions.

Pinpointing where threats thrive

As digital environments become more complex within a given organization, proactively countering adversaries becomes all the more difficult. It’s harder to implement, scale, and adhere to existing security and control frameworks. It’s also increasingly challenging to apply framework guidance to new applications, build and support infrastructure within a secure foundation, and maintain good cyber hygiene through the digital lifecycle.

As reported by TechTarget, the 2020 hack of the SolarWinds Orion IT performance monitoring system is a prime example. It grabbed headlines “not because a single company was breached, but because it triggered a much larger software supply chain incident.” This vulnerability in popular, commercially available, and widely utilized software compromised the data, networks, and systems of thousands of companies when a routine software update turned out to be backdoor malware.

A close look at the root problems behind high-profile security breaches reveals that it’s a lack of agility and an inability to scale resources that prohibit the modern security organization’s ability to respond quickly enough to counter new challenges. Look even closer and you’ll often find an insufficient implementation of best practices and ineffective solutions, leaving an organization continually chasing the next tool or solution and scrambling to stay ahead of emerging threats.

While the cost to individual businesses is high, most organizations struggle with the needed skills and resources to rigorously maintain data security basics and ensure readiness for inevitable attacks. The previous sentence is especially true when you consider that maintaining an effective state of cybersecurity readiness is a costly practice that requires the continual development of expertise, the evaluation of new tools, and an ongoing element of vigilance.

Threat visibility is a big part of the problem. You can’t protect your company from what you can’t see. For individual enterprises – with critical data workloads housed in a combination of on-premises servers, a variety of endpoints, and both private and public cloud instances – staying ahead in the ongoing battle requires a new approach.

The identification of actionable alerts and other data contributes to a better overall state of readiness. Thought leadership and discussions related to Autonomic Security Operations provide a promising outlook for security organizations willing to lean into the changing technology landscape – a landscape that now benefits from leveraging automation and machine learning currently used in security stacks. Reducing the chance of introducing vulnerabilities or missing-critical alerts starts with ensuring full visibility into an increasingly expanding and complex environment.

The evolution of a shared responsibility to a shared fate

Industry megatrends are driving cloud adoption and with it a path to improved cybersecurity. Among these trends is the concept of shared fate as an evolution of the historical shared-responsibility model. Shared fate drives a flywheel of increasing trust which develops as more enterprises transition to the cloud. This compels an even higher security investment and a more vested interest from cloud service providers.

At Google Cloud, shared fate means we take an active stake in our customers’ security posture, offering capabilities and defaults that help ensure secure deployments and configurations in the public cloud. We also offer experience-based guidance on how to configure cloud workloads for security, and can assist with risk management, reduction, and transfer.

The Google Cloud Risk Protection Program represents the continuing evolution of the shared-fate model. The program offers a practical solution that provides the modern enterprise a snapshot comparison of its current security state against well-adopted cloud-security frameworks. It also give you an opportunity to explore cyber insurance designed to meet your needs from our partners Allianz and Munich Re.

When performed with diligence, cloud adoption can help increase your overall cybersecurity effectiveness. Using a hybrid approach – and steadily reducing which data assets remain on premises – can strengthen your overall security posture and reduce risks to the organization.

Cloud security and the ability to reduce risk

In comparison to the enterprise-by-enterprise security scramble to protect data and workloads in individual private clouds, global public cloud solutions like Google Cloud can be a force multiplier when adhering to established best practices. By that, we mean, quite literally, that you get more security at every touchpoint – from infrastructure and software to access and data security.

Strong security in the public cloud starts with the foundational pieces: the hardware and design elements. At Google, for example, we take a security-by-design approach within both the data center and purpose-built components themselves. Within Google Cloud, data is encrypted by default – both at rest and in transit. Google’s baseline security architecture adheres to the zero trust principles, meaning that every network, device, person, or service initially cannot be trusted.

Embarking on a zero trust architecture journey gives modern security practitioners the ability to methodically shut down traditional attack vectors. Zero trust also provides more granular visibility and control of rapidly expanding environments. The recent emphasis of its benefits, as the U.S. White House set forth through an executive order on increasing cybersecurity resilience, is an example of the wide-scale recognition by both government and industry on the benefits of this approach.

Since adopting a zero trust approach more than a decade ago, Google has achieved a recognizable level of maturity, reflected by our internal infrastructure and multiple enterprise offerings, enabling different aspects of the zero trust security journey.

Compliance and privacy drive critical elements of the cloud adoption cycle

Privacy frameworks, regulatory compliance, and data sovereignty are driving critical elements of the cloud adoption cycle. Cloud providers must ensure they have the necessary controls, attestations, and abilities to audit in order to provide organizations with the tools to preemptively satisfy regulatory and compliance mandates across the globe.

Now consistently expected to be part of a design feature that’s built into the cloud journey, it cannot simply be an add-on capability. The direction of this evolution promises to play more of a role in the future of cloud adoption, not less. Because this is an ongoing component of enterprise risk evaluation, your business must consider cloud providers that can partner on this critical aspect of the journey – and not leave you without the resources to respond to this growing critical need.

Building trust into your digital transformation journey

Digital transformation is difficult because the modern enterprise must build and design for both today and tomorrow. From a security perspective, the challenge has often been that security industry practitioners cannot always predict what the future will look like. That said, there are clear steps you can take to mitigate all-around risk throughout the process.

How you approach the cloud is, of course, integral to your journey, but it doesn’t need to be an all-or-nothing proposition. And although technology debt continues to persist with legacy systems, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t begin to move forward.

Google Cloud enables you to modernize at your own pace and understand what’s realistic. We recommend you move what data you can to a more secure public cloud today, followed by a phased approach to move more in the months and years that follow. The key tenets of our approach to security in the public cloud include:

• The security-by-design posture of Google Cloud can help modern-day enterprises scale security capabilities and reduce risk with an architecture built on zero trust principles.
• The Google Cloud approach to security and resiliency includes a framework to help you protect against adverse cyber events by using our comprehensive suite of solutions.
• Google Cloud can help ensure your organization adheres to the requirements of a growing and increasingly complex regulatory and compliance environment.
• The ideal model of a future organization is one where cloud plays a major role in infrastructure design and architecture. Your organization should begin to view public cloud as an enabler of the business and a core component of digital transformation.

As you transition more data to the public cloud, it’s paramount that trust is ingrained in every step you take with your cloud service provider. Many service providers readily take on a shared responsibility with your organization when it comes to security. At Google, we take it several steps further with our shared fate model to help ensure data security in the public cloud. Your future and our’s are part of the same data security journey.

When it comes to cloud security, 2022 will be the year that the past catches up with the future. Trends that businesses have been ignoring for too long will force organizations large and small to confront and control their security debt. 

That’s according to Google Cloud’s own cybersecurity experts, who have identified four security trends that organizations need to watch out for—and get ahead of. We have predictions on what to expect in the coming year from MK Palmore, director of the Office of the CISO; Brian Roddy, vice president of engineering for Cloud Security; Tim Dierks, engineering director for data protection; and Panos Mavrommatis and Vikram Makhija, senior directors of security engineering for Google Cloud.

Supply chain shenanigans

“We will see continued asymmetric attacks from adversaries as they exploit supply chains and other previously ‘trusted’ third-party entities,” says Palmore. 

Supply-chain problems in cloud computing should be easily solvable, right? Software versions and any vulnerabilities they contain should be trackable and patchable, but the reality of fixing software is that “just patch it” is hard to execute—just look at the challenges posed by the Log4j 2 vulnerability. Supply chain is such a huge problem that President Biden addressed it in an Executive Order in May 2021. Customers can expect the issue to be top of mind at Google Cloud.

Not exactly many happy returns (to the office)

“Return to office around the world will drive changes as office infrastructure has not been invested in for a year and a half while the focus has been on remote users. This likely will drive a short-term boom in traditional on-prem security, but it will be the last boom for that as people adapt their remote, zero-trust style strategies to a more modern on-prem approach,” says Roddy.

The misconception that on-prem infrastructure is categorically more secure than cloud is driven by the desire to have physical access to servers and backups so that only the organization which owns the data controls it and has access to it, even in cases of a catastrophic failure or successful cyberattack. In the early years of cloud computing, that may even have been true. But the conditions that drove the myth of on-prem security primacy changed years ago, and the needs driving secure cloud infrastructure help ensure that cloud stays more secure. 

Paying down your security debt

“While there’s all the new hotness of cutting-edge concerns, many enterprises still carry security risks and security debt from not yet fully adopting controls which have been broadly accepted as important for years. For example, loads of companies are still not using phishing-resistant two-factor authentication such as FIDO keys,” says Dierks.

Authentication keys such as those made by Yubico and Google’s own Titan Security key support the zero-trust security principles that require user identities to be authenticated, authorized, and then continuously validated before they can access applications and data. Strong authentication is such an important part of contemporary user security that even weaker forms of it that rely on text messages are significantly more secure than not using it at all. That said, why use a less-secure standard when you can reduce risks to your data and bottom line even further by requiring a phishing-resistant hardware key?

Dierks stresses another challenging but important part of eliminating security debt: using social connections to encourage best security practices. “It’s important for CISOs to use their business relationships to emphasize the importance of baseline controls [such as 2FA] for their partners. Enterprises have close relationships that attackers can leverage, so it’s critical that partners hold each other accountable to maintain high security.” 

KYD (Know Your Data)

The impact of a data breach can harm organizations as they currently are as well as far into the future. Current tough-to-crack encryption standards protecting data could become easier to decode in the years ahead, so even if cybercriminals can’t access stolen data now there’s no guarantee that paradigm will hold. This means it’s crucially important that organizations understand what data they’re storing, how they’re storing it, and where they’re storing it, say Mavrommatis and Makhija.

“You can’t secure what you don’t know about, and not all data breaches are equal. Stolen machine logs are not as bad as customer data. But how many security teams know the difference? So you have to crawl your own data to automatically classify and discover where sensitive data lives,” they say.

Makhija adds that the shared fate model requires the cloud providers and cloud customers to have a mutual understanding of the quantitative risks each faces. “Shared fate models will pick up significantly in 2022,” he says, as more organizations move to the cloud, and those already using cloud infrastructure improve their security postures. 

“To date, there’s been a disparate set of tools for understanding your posture. It’s difficult for third-party tools to stitch together what cloud services should be providing from the start,” he says. 

What you can do to make your organization more secure

One cloud security trend that’s ever-present is the ever-increasing importance of keeping cloud deployments secure. As cloud infrastructure becomes more commonplace across businesses and industries of all sizes, it will continue to grow as an attractive target for cybercriminals and other threat actors.

• Because enterprise data has expanded exponentially, the ability to identify and detect threats have become increasingly challenging. To better secure the enterprise software supply chain, use advanced threat detection and analysis tools—especially those designed to catch anomalies. 
• The faster that organizations adopt a zero-trust architecture, the more secure the new normal can be. Zero trust helps limit the blast radius of any potential intrusion, while maximizing new enterprise access expectations. Part of adopting zero trust means many end-users can abandon legacy technology like VPNs, but the benefits of segmentation and context-aware access for both identity and device will make all the difference for large scale enterprises. When coupled with a full zero-trust approach and the use of a zero-trust maturity model for improvement, organizations will be better positioned to manage their digital risks.
• Security debt can come in many forms and one critical payoff that needs to be made is for organizations to migrate en masse to hardware two-factor authentication keys. They make user accounts significantly more resistant to takeovers, and are much harder to circumvent than two-factor authentication over SMS. 
• It’s past time to get to know your data, and a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of red wine won’t help. There are third-party tools that can do this, but for Google Cloud customers who use BigQuery there’s automatic Data Loss Prevention. It continuously monitors existing tables and profiles new ones; it can be customized for selected folders or projects, or for an entire organization; and it generates data profiles in the same geographic region as the original data.

Understanding and managing the security challenges of cloud infrastructure helps maximize its benefits, and makes for a safer security landscape in 2022—and beyond.

The European Commission (EC) has recently published new Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs, also known as Model Contractual Clauses) to help safeguard European personal data. Following the applicable transition period, these new SCCs will replace the SCCs previously adopted by the EC. Google Cloud plans to incorporate the new SCCs into our contracts to help protect our customers’ data and meet the requirements of European privacy legislation.

Like the previous SCCs, these clauses can be used to facilitate lawful transfers of data under certain conditions. By imposing various contractual obligations, SCCs allow personal data subject to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to flow to recipients outside the European Economic Area (EEA). The GDPR is an important piece of EU privacy legislation that became applicable in 2018. It requires appropriate safeguards for EEA personal data moving from the EEA to any non-EEA countries that do not meet the EU ‘adequacy’ standard for privacy protection. 

Google Cloud’s industry-leading controls, contractual commitments, and accountability tools have helped organizations across Europe meet stringent data protection regulatory requirements for years. We have provided customers with SCCs since 2012. In 2017, EU Data Protection Authorities confirmed that Google Cloud’s contractual commitments met the legal requirements for transfers of data from the EU to the rest of the world under EU Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC. Google Cloud remains committed to protecting the privacy of our customers and their users, and to helping thems address EU regulatory obligations.  

To learn more about how Google Cloud can help organizations with their compliance efforts, visit our Cloud Compliance resource center.