At Google Cloud, we believe in making it simple and secure to consume services whether they’re from Google, a third party or customer-owned. With Private Service Connect, we have adopted a service-centric approach to our network that abstracts the underlying networking infrastructure. And today, we are announcing Private Service Connect is generally available in all Google Cloud regions.

Private Service Connect allows you to create private and secure connections from your cloud networks to services like Cloud Storage or Cloud Bigtable and third-party services like Elastic, MongoDB or Snowflake. It creates service endpoints in your VPCs that provide private connectivity and policy enforcement, allowing you to easily connect to services across different networks and organizations.

Customers told us they want to consume services faster while making sure that the connectivity is private and secure. In the past, achieving this was a challenge: networking teams had to negotiate IP address blocks, mutually agree on policies and coordinate as applications evolved to newer versions. With Private Service Connect, you can delegate the consumption and delivery of services to different teams without having to coordinate between teams.

How it works

Private Service Connect makes it easy to consume services by leveraging service endpoints that are locally managed. The services can be in different projects or managed by different organizations. Access to the service is controlled by strict governance and IAM policies. Application teams and developers can focus on delivering their services easily by exposing their ‘service attachment’. No more worrying about networking constructs—Private Service Connect takes care of connecting to the service on the Google backbone for them.  

Benefits to our partners

Being able to consume services from a variety of software vendors and service providers makes it possible for enterprises to innovate faster. For that, developers need to be able to compose services from third-party vendors, Google managed services, as well as their own services. To help, third-party partners can use Private Service Connect to deliver multi-tenant services securely and at massive scale, and make the connectivity to their services appear as if they are running on the enterprises’ network. Private Service Connect will also integrate with Service Directory to register many producer services, making service consumption even simpler. 

“In today’s environment, where seamless access to real-time market information and the ability to handle increasingly vast volumes of data is essential, our clients are demanding native connectivity in the cloud. Google’s Private Service Connect offers the performance and reliability required by the types of mission critical apps that rely on Bloomberg’s tick for tick market data feed, B-PIPE.” —Cory Albert, Global Head of Cloud Strategy, Enterprise Data at Bloomberg 

“One of the key goals for Elastic on Google Cloud is to monitor and protect our customers’ data. Google Cloud’s Private Service Connect with Elastic Cloud furthers our commitment to our customers that together we make it quick, easy and secure to gain insights and intelligence from their data.” —Uri Cohen, Product Lead for Elastic Cloud

“MongoDB’s partnership with Google is an integral part of our strategy to support modern apps and mission-critical databases and to become a cloud data company. Private Service Connect allows our customers to connect to MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud seamlessly and securely and we’re excited for customers to have this additional and important capability.”—Andrew Davidson, VP of Cloud Product, MongoDB

Check out the Google Cloud Console to try it today.

Organizations in every region and industry are developing APIs to enable easier and more standardized delivery of services and data for digital experiences. This increasing shift to digital experiences has grown API usage and traffic volumes. However, as malicious API attacks also have grown, API security has become an important battleground over business risk.

To help customers more easily address their growing API security needs, Google Cloud is announcing today the Preview of Advanced API Security, a comprehensive set of API security capabilities built on Apigee, our API management platform. Advanced API Security enables organizations to more easily detect security threats. Here’s a closer look at the two key functionality included in this launch: identifying API misconfigurations and detecting bots.

Identify API misconfigurations

Misconfigured APIs are one of the leading reasons for API security incidents. In 2017, Gartner® predicted that by 2022 API abuses will be the most frequent attack vector resulting in data breaches for enterprise web applications. Today, our customers tell us application API security is one of their top concerns, which is supported by an independent study from 2021 by Fugue and Sonatype. The report found that misconfigurations are the number one cause of data breaches, and that “too many cloud APIs and interfaces to adequately govern” are frequently the main point of attack in cyberattacks.

While identifying and resolving API misconfigurations is a top priority for many organizations, the configuration management process can be time consuming and require considerable resources.

Advanced API Security can make it easier for API teams to identify API proxies that do not conform to security standards. To help identify APIs that are misconfigured or experiencing abuse, Advanced API Security regularly assesses managed APIs and provides API teams with a recommended action when configuration issues are detected.

Advanced API Security identifies misconfigured API proxies, including the missing CORS policy.
APIs form an integral part of the digital connective tissue that make modern medicine run smoothly for patients and healthcare staff. One common healthcare API use case occurs when a healthcare organization inputs a patient’s medical coverage information into a system that works with insurance companies. Almost instantly, that system determines the patient’s coverage for a specific medication or procedure, a process which is enabled by APIs. Because of the often-sensitive personal healthcare data being transmitted, it is important that the required authentication and authorization policies are implemented so that only authorized users, such as an insurance company, can access the API.

Advanced API Security can detect if those required policies have not been applied, an alert which can help reduce the surface area of API security risks. By leveraging Advanced API Security, API teams at healthcare organizations can more easily detect misconfiguration issues and can reduce security risks to sensitive information.

Detect Bots

Because of the increasing volume of API traffic, there is also an increase in cybercrime in the form of API bot attacks—the automated software programs deployed over the Internet for malicious purposes like identity theft.

Advanced API Security uses pre-configured rules to help provide API teams an easier way to identify malicious bots within API traffic. Each rule represents a different type of unusual traffic from a single IP address. If an API traffic pattern meets any of the rules, Advanced API Security reports it as a bot.

Additionally, Advanced API Security can speed up the process of identifying data breaches by identifying bots that successfully resulted in the HTTP 200 OK success status response code.

Financial services APIs are frequently the target of malicious bot attacks due to the high-value data that is processed. A bank that has adopted open banking standards by making APIs accessible to customers and partners can use Advanced API Security to make it easier to analyze traffic patterns and identify the sources of malicious traffic. You may experience this when your bank allows you to access your data with a third-party application. While a malicious hacker could try to use a bot to access this information, Advanced API Security can help the bank’s API team to identify and stop malicious bot activity in API traffic.

API Security at Equinix

Equinix powers the world’s digital leaders, bringing together and interconnecting infrastructure to fast-track digital advantage. Operating a global network of more than 240 data centers with a 99.999% or greater uptime, Equinix simplifies global interconnections for organizations, saving customers time and effort with the Apigee API management platform.

“A key enabler of our success is Google’s Apigee, delivering digital infrastructure services securely and quickly to our customers and partners,” said Yun Freund, senior vice president of Platform at Equinix. “Security is a key pillar to our API-first strategy and Apigee has been instrumental in enabling our customers to securely bridge the connections they need for their businesses to easily identify potential security risks and mitigate threats in a timely fashion. As our API traffic has grown, so has the amount of time and effort required to secure our APIs. Having a bundled solution in one managed platform gives us a differentiated high-performing solution.”

Getting started

To learn more, check out the documentation or contact us to request access to get started with Advanced API Security.

To learn more about API security best practices, please register to attend our Cloud OnAir webcast on Thursday, July 28th, 2:00 pm PT.

Backup and DR data is a valuable business asset, and ensuring that it’s safe and accessible is essential. In particular, you want to be able to monitor your backups to ensure that the data is indeed protected and that you can quickly recover it in the event of a disaster, user error, or failed upgrade.

Users of Google Cloud’s Backup and DR service often ask:

1. What are the best practices for monitoring my backup and recovery jobs?
2. How can I proactively identify issues and troubleshoot? 
3. How can I create alerts and be notified about important events? 

The good news is that Google Cloud Backup and DR now integrates with Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring tools. Now, you can monitor backup events, jobs, appliance health, resource consumption and user actions in the same way you monitor other Google Cloud workloads and services. 

With this integration, you can now:

• Monitor events related to backup and restore – With detailed Google Cloud Backup and DR service event logs in Cloud Logging, you can now use log based alerts to create a customisable notification, in near-real time. This lets you monitor important events such as  backup job failures, jobs that did not run, local backup storage saturation, and network failures.
• Configure fine grained alerting – You can write custom event queries on a wide variety of dimensions such as event severity, application type, application name, job type, job name, error message and many more. This gives a lot of flexibility to define alerts for specific events or conditions within a system, thus reducing noise and helping you identify and fix issues easily. 
• Get notified on your preferred notification channel – Google Cloud offers seven pre-built notification channels that let you receive customisable notifications directly over email, SMS, Slack or the Google Cloud mobile app. Alternatively, you can integrate with your own monitoring and event management tools using webhooks or Pub/Sub. 
• Derive useful insights to troubleshoot issues – With Log Analytics, you can use BigQuery to query your data using SQL queries and generate operational insights, which can help you reduce time spent troubleshooting. For example, you can analyze the key reasons that backup and restore jobs fail for a given application or application type. 

The integration also lets you proactively discover deeper issues related to backup and recovery, such as capacity-related issues or certain job failures that happen periodically, by monitoring recurring events in the logs over time. With log-based metrics, you can: 

• Create trend charts to track important metrics such as the number of backup or restore jobs that failed during a day/week/month 
• Receive a notification when the number of occurrences crosses a threshold, for example receive a notification if a snapshot pool saturates more than five times a week 
• Monitor trends in data, such as latency values in logs, and receive a notification if the values change in an unacceptable way.

Getting started

The time to learn that your backup failed should never be when you go to restore. By integrating our Backup and DR service with Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging, you can get valuable assurances about the health of your backup and business continuity processes with the same tools that you use to manage other Google Cloud workloads. To get started, check out the Backup and DR event logs page. You can also watch a video that shows you how to set up and use the service and configure some custom alerts.

Over the past two decades, Google has innovated to build some of the largest and most secure computing systems in the world. This scale requires us to deliver pioneering approaches to cloud security, which we pass on to our Google Cloud customers. We are committed to solving hard security problems like only Google can, as the tip of the spear of innovation and threat intelligence.

Today we’re excited to share the next step in this journey with the completion of our acquisition of Mandiant, a leader in dynamic cyber defense, threat intelligence and incident response services. Mandiant shares our cybersecurity vision and will join Google Cloud to help organizations improve their threat, incident and exposure management.

Combining Google Cloud’s existing security portfolio with Mandiant’s leading cyber threat intelligence will allow us to deliver a security operations suite to help enterprises globally stay protected at every stage of the security lifecycle. With the scale of Google’s data processing, novel analytics approaches with AI and machine learning, and a focus on eliminating entire classes of threats, Google Cloud and Mandiant will help organizations reinvent security to meet the requirements of our rapidly changing world.

We will retain the Mandiant brand and continue Mandiant’s mission to make every organization secure from cyber threats and confident in their readiness.

Context and threat intelligence from the frontlines

Our goal is to democratize security operations with access to the best threat intelligence and built-in threat detections and responses. Ultimately, we hope to shift the industry to a more proactive approach focused on modernizing Security Operations workflows, personnel, and underlying technologies to achieve an autonomic state of existence – where threat management functions can scale as customers’ needs change and as threats evolve.

Today Google Cloud security customers use our cloud infrastructure to ingest, analyze and retain all their security telemetry across multicloud and on-premise environments. By leveraging our sub-second search across petabytes of information combined with security orchestration, automation and response capabilities, our customers can spend more time defending their organizations.

The addition of Mandiant Threat Intelligence—which is compiled by their team of security and intelligence individuals spread across 22 countries, who serve customers located in 80 countries—will give security practitioners greater visibility and expertise from the frontlines. Mandiant’s experience detecting and responding to sophisticated cyber threat actors will offer Google Cloud customers actionable insights into the threats that matter to their businesses right now. We will continue to share groundbreaking Mandiant threat research to help support organizations, even for those who don’t run on Google Cloud.

Advancing shared fate for security operations

Google Cloud operates in a shared fate model, taking an active stake in the security posture of our customers. For security operations that means helping organizations find and validate potential security issues before they become an incident.

Detecting, investigating and responding to threats is only part of better cyber risk management. It’s also crucial to understand what an organization looks like from an attacker’s perspective and if an organization’s cybersecurity controls are as effective as expected.

By adding Mandiant’s attack surface management capabilities to Google Cloud’s portfolio, organizations will be able to continually monitor assets for exposures, enabling intelligence and red teams to move security programs from reactive to proactive to understand what’s vulnerable, misconfigured and exposed.

Once an organization’s attack surface is understood, validating existing security controls is critical. With Mandiant Security Validation, organizations will be able to continuously validate and measure the effectiveness of their cybersecurity controls across cloud and on-premise environments.

Transforming security operations and incident response

Security leaders and their teams often lack the resources and expertise required to keep pace with today’s ever changing threats. Organizations already harness Google’s security tools, expert advice and rich partner ecosystem to evolve their security program. Google’s Autonomic Security Operations also serves as a prescriptive solution to guide our customers through this modernization journey.

With the addition of Mandiant to the Google Cloud family, we can now offer proven global expertise in comprehensive incident response, strategic readiness and technical assurance to help organizations mitigate threats and reduce business risk before, during and after an incident.

In addition, Google Cloud’s security operations suite will continue to provide a central point of intelligence, analysis and operations across on-premise environments, Google Cloud and other cloud providers. Google Cloud is also deeply committed to supporting our technology and solution partners, and this acquisition will enable system integrators, resellers and managed security service providers to offer broader solutions to customers.

Comments on the news

“The power of stronger partnerships across the cybersecurity ecosystem is critical to driving value for clients and protecting industries around the globe. The combination of Google Cloud and Mandiant and their commitment to multicloud will further support increased collaboration, driving innovation across the cybersecurity industry and augmenting threat research capabilities. We look forward to working with them on this mission.” – Paolo Dal Cin, Global Lead, Accenture Security

“Google’s acquisition of Mandiant, a leader in security advisory, consulting and incident response services will allow Google Cloud to deliver an end-to-end security operations suite with even greater capabilities and services to support customers in their security transformation across cloud and on-premise environments.” – Craig Robinson, Research VP, Security Services, IDC

“Bringing together Mandiant and Google Cloud, two long-time cybersecurity leaders, will advance how companies identify and defend against threats. We look forward to the impact of this acquisition, both for the security industry and the protection of our customers.” – Andy Schworer, Director, Cyber Defense Engineering, Uber

We welcome Mandiant to the Google Cloud team, and together we look forward to helping security teams achieve so much more in defense of their organizations. You can read our release and Kevin Mandia’s blog for more on this exciting news.