Google's BeyondCorp to Accelerate U.S. Govt's Zero Trust Journey - Build What's Next
Blog

Google’s BeyondCorp to Accelerate U.S. Govt’s Zero Trust Journey

3016

Of your peers have already read this article.

3:00 Minutes

The most insightful time you'll spend today!

Security attacks from 2020, raised concerns on the exploitability of the govt resources. U.S. Federal agencies to improve security are directed to implement Zero Trust architectures. Learn how Google's BeyondCorp accelerates this journey.

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. 

White House

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.

Safe Cybersecurity

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.

Whitepaper

More and More Businesses Trust the Cloud. Here’s Why.

DOWNLOAD WHITEPAPER

6565

Of your peers have already downloaded this article

5:30 Minutes

The most insightful time you'll spend today!

What’s behind the rising confidence in cloud security? First hand experience, and careful, systematic assessments that tap multiple sources such as detailed audits and comparisons. The most frequent driver of increased confidence was the direct experience of the quality of security in the cloud versus on-premises.

As a result, the use of Cloud is expected to rise to 65 percent of workloads by 2019, according to a recent survey of more than 500 global CIOs conducted on behalf of Google Cloud in association with MIT SMR Custom Studio. Increased confidence in cloud security along with the increased need for agility and speed are driving this growth in cloud adoption.

Download this exclusive report and understand why CIOs have a growing confidence in cloud security, how they are basing their hosting decisions on the flexibility and integration offered by the cloud, and their plans to use the cloud for future workloads.

Blog

Latest Enhancements in reCAPTCHA Enterprise Helps Govts Sites Protect against Digital Frauds

2994

Of your peers have already read this article.

1:30 Minutes

The most insightful time you'll spend today!

The Google Cloud reCAPTCHA Enterprise expands bot detection to safeguard public sector websites from a range of digital frauds and automated attacks. Read this blogpost to boost website security with the reCAPTCHA Enterprise handbook!

Download our guidebook to learn how reCAPTCHA Enterprise can help strengthen your website security quickly.

Cyber threats on the rise


In 2021, the United States saw 40.5% of website attacks committed through “bad bots” on the internet, with 37.2% of government website traffic being bad bots, according to research by cybersecurity firm Imperva1. As cyber threats increase, government agencies need a way to safely let constituents access digital services. Google Cloud reCAPTCHA Enterprise protects websites by distinguishing between humans and bots. Full-scale implementation of reCAPTCHA Enterprise solution expands on bot detection to protect public sector websites from a broad range of digital fraud. Below are some highlights from our new reCAPTCHA Enterprise guidebook detailing functional enhancements and ways for government agencies to take advantage of enterprise capabilities.

Advanced website protection


reCAPTCHA Enterprise builds upon the existing reCAPTCHA API that has defended 5+ million websites for over a decade. It uses advanced risk analysis techniques to distinguish between humans and bots, protecting sites from spam and abuse as well as detecting other fraudulent activities, including credential stuffing, account takeovers (ATO), and automated account creation.

How it works


Detecting password leaks and credential breaches
With reCAPTCHA Enterprise’s password leak protection, agencies can conduct regular audits of user credentials, such as passwords, to detect leaks and breaches and prevent account takeovers (ATOs), as well as credential stuffing attacks.

UI challenge vs. frictionless
reCAPTCHA Enterprise returns a score, giving you the ability to take a number of actions, including requiring additional factors of authentication or throttling bots that may be scraping content. This functionality allows you to verify if an interaction is legitimate without any user interaction.

User-friendly migration
Google Cloud’s reCAPTCHA Enterprise offers a simple migration process in which your account is moved from the reCAPTCHA Admin to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) after you create a project to migrate it to. Watch our 10-minute webinar to see how.

A cost-effective upgrade to a standard cybersecurity solution
Google reCAPTCHA Enterprise comes with 99.9%+ uptime, multi-factor authentication, and support for Android, iOS, and web applications. Our reCAPTCHA offering is structured in a way that allows you to fully control your investment and responsibly allocate taxpayer dollars.

reCAPTCHA Enterprise in action


Google Cloud’s reCAPTCHA protects against key automated attacks, including account creation, credential stuffing, cashing out, denial of inventory, and skewing. State governments have found success with using Google Cloud’s reCAPTCHA for cyber risk management. Wisconsin’s Workforce Development Agency used fraud detection and identification, including reCAPTCHA, to mitigate malicious bot logins on its external website, and several agencies in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania have implemented reCAPTCHA to prevent bots from booking and reselling COVID-19 vaccine appointments.

Protecting public sector websites from bad actors can be challenging, especially with emerging threats from adversaries and extremist groups. Google Cloud’s reCAPTCHA Enterprise offers comprehensive website security solutions to successfully protect against cyber threats.

Download our reCAPTCHA Enterprise guidebook for a detailed look at how you can use reCAPTCHA Enterprise to strengthen your website security and implement the solution quickly and easily.

References:

  1. Bad Bot Report 2021: The Pandemic of the Internet

How-to

Center for Internet Security’s Latest Benchmark for Securing Chrome

5407

Of your peers have already read this article.

1:30 Minutes

The most insightful time you'll spend today!

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) releases benchmarks for enterprises using Chrome browser in their environment to secure and optimize it. Read the blog for a quick snippet on the benchmarks and more details on configuration guidelines.

As the way people work continues to evolve, keeping security policies in place that protect organizations but give workers the ability to get things done is more important than ever. IT and security teams must aim to stay a step ahead of web-based security threats that come their organization’s way. To help, the Center for Internet Security (CIS) team has released the latest CIS Benchmark 2.1 for Google Chrome. This Benchmark offers independent recommendations on which Chrome policies to configure to help support organizations’ security and compliance needs. Thanks to Chrome being built with security at its core, in many cases, Chrome default settings are aligned with CIS recommendations.

Chrome is secure by default, but we also pride ourselves on providing customizations for enterprises to allow Chrome to better fit the needs of their business. And with hundreds of policies available through Chrome Browser Cloud Management and Group Policy Objects (Note: The CIS Benchmark is also available as a GPO), organizations can do just that. 

Throughout the CIS guide you’ll notice that there are different designations for configuration profiles. Any labeled Level 1, are considered to be a good baseline for an organization. Level 2 profiles are recommended for deployments that require the highest level of security, but note that these settings could have a trade off on user productivity. We recommend looking at each setting and determining if it’s a good fit for your business. 

The benchmark is made up of five sections:

  • Enforced Defaults — Notes policies that are configured by default when you install Chrome. Enforcing these settings at an enterprise level can prevent these settings from being changed by business users to less secure options.
  • Attack Surface Reduction — Details how to disable web features that may not be necessary in your enterprise environment and could reduce your overall attack surface.
  • Privacy — Surfaces settings that improve user privacy.
  • Data Loss Prevention — Contains settings that can help prevent data loss and protect your organization’s data. (Note: These recommendations cover additional capabilities that can be added to Chrome through BeyondCorp Enterprise). 
  • Forensics (Post Incident) — Shares recommendations on policies that give insights into post incident forensics and analysis. 

Organizations can use these benchmarks to optimize the best way to secure Chrome in their environment. Download the CIS Benchmark here and check out our team’s configuration guide for additional recommendations on how to configure Chrome.

Note: This benchmark was created using a consensus review process composed of subject matter experts. Consensus participants provide perspective from a diverse set of backgrounds such as consulting, software development, audit and compliance, security  research, operations, government, and legal. While these recommendations come from a trusted source, it’s important for each organization to weigh which policies make the most sense for their business.

Blog

A Look Back on Google Cloud’s Data Analytics Development Efforts from June

5979

Of your peers have already read this article.

4:00 Minutes

The most insightful time you'll spend today!

Experts at Google Cloud delivered a slew of new features across their data analytics products, BigQuery, Dataflow, Data Fusion, and more to enhance scalability, security, speed and user-friendliness.

June is the month that holds the summer solstice, and some of us in the northern hemisphere get to enjoy the longest days of sunshine out of the entire year. We used all the hours we could in June to deliver a flurry of new features across BigQuery, Dataflow, Data Fusion, and more.  Let’s take a look!

Simple, Sophisticated, and Secure

Usability is a key tenant of our data analytics development efforts. Our new user-friendly BigQuery improvements this month include:

  • Flexible data type casting
  • Formatting to change column descriptions 
  • GRANT/REVOKE access control commands using SQL

We hope this will delight data analysts, data scientists, DBAs, and SQL-enthusiasts who can find out more details in our blog here.

Beyond simplifying commands, we also recognize that it’s equally important to have more sophistication when dealing with transactions. That’s why we introduced multi-statement transactions in BigQuery.

As you probably know, BigQuery has long supported single-statement transactions through DML statements, such as INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, MERGE and TRUNCATE, applied to one table per transaction. With multi-statement transactions, you can now use multiple SQL statements, including DML, spanning multiple tables in a single transaction. 

This means that any data changes across multiple tables associated with all statements in a given transaction are committed atomically (all at once) if successful—or all rolled back atomically in the event of a failure. 

Multi-statement transactions for BigQuery

We also know that organizations need to control access to data, down to the granular level and that, with the complexity of data platforms increasing day by day, it’s become even more critical to identify and monitor who has access to sensitive data. 

To help address these needs,  we announced the general availability of BigQuery row-level security. This capability gives customers a way to control access to subsets of data in the same table for different groups of users. Row-level security in BigQuery enables different user personas access to subsets of data in the same table and can easily be created, updated, and dropped using DDL statements. To learn more, check out the documentation and best practices.

Row Level Security with BigQuery

Simple, Safe, and Smart

Beyond building a simpler, more sophisticated and more secure data platform for customers, our team has been focused on providing solutions powered by built-in intelligence. One of our core beliefs is that for machine learning to be adopted and useful at scale, it must be easy to use and deploy.  

BigQuery ML, our embedded machine learning capabilities, have been adopted by 80% of our top customers around the globe and it has become a cornerstone of their data to value journey.  

As part of our efforts, we announced the general availability of AutoML tables in BigQuery ML.  This no-code solution lets customers automatically build and deploy state-of-the-art machine learning models on structured data. With easy integration with Vertex AI, AutoML in BQML makes it simple to achieve machine learning magic in the background. From preprocessing data to feature engineering and model tuning all the way to cross validation, AutoML will “automagically” select and ensemble models so everyone—even non-data scientists—can use it.   

Want to take this feature for a test drive? Try it today on BigQuery’s NYC Taxi public dataset following the instructions in this blog! 

Speaking of public datasets, we also introduced the availability of Google Trends data in BigQuery to enable customers to measure interest in a topic or search term across Google Search.  This new dataset will soon be available in Analytics Hub and will be anonymized, indexed, normalized, and aggregated prior to publication. 

Want to ensure your end-cap displays are relevant to your local audience?  You can take signals from what people are looking for in your market area to inform what items to place. Want to understand what new features could be incorporated into an existing product based on what people are searching for?  Terms that appear in these datasets could be an indicator of what you should be paying attention to.

All this data and technology can be put to use to deploy critical solutions to grow and protect your business. For example,  it can be difficult to know how to define anomalies during detection. If you have labeled data with known anomalies, then you can choose from a variety of supervised machine learning model types that are already supported in BigQuery ML. 

But what if you don’t know what kind of anomaly to expect, and you don’t have labeled data? Unlike typical predictive techniques that leverage supervised learning, organizations may need to be able to detect anomalies in the absence of labeled data. 

That’s why, we were particularly excited to announce the public preview of new anomaly detection capabilities in BigQuery ML that leverage unsupervised machine learning to help you detect anomalies without needing labeled data.  

Our team has been working with a large number of enterprises who leverage machine learning for better anomaly detection. In financial services for example, customers have used our technology to detect machine-learned anomalies in real-time foreign exchange data.  

To make it easier for you to take advantage of their best practices, we teamed up with Kasna to develop sample code, architecture guidance, and a data synthesizer that generates data so you can test these innovations right away. 

Simple, Scalable, and Speedy

Capturing, processing and analyzing data in motion has become an important component of our customer architecture choices. Along with batch processing, many of you need the flexibility to stream records into BigQuery so they can become available for query as they are written.  

Our new BigQuery Storage Write API combines the functionality of streaming ingestion and batch loading into a single API. You can use it to stream records into BigQuery or even batch process an arbitrarily large number of records and commit them in a single atomic operation.

Flexible systems that can do batch and real-time in the same environment is in our DNA: Dataflow, our serverless, data processing service for streaming and batch data was built with flexibility in mind.  

This principle applies not just to what Dataflow does but also how you can leverage it—whether you prefer using Dataflow SQL right from the BigQuery web UI, Vertex AI notebooks from the Dataflow interface, or the vast collection of pre-built templates to develop streaming pipelines.

Dataflow has been in the news quite a bit recently. You might have noted the recent introduction of Dataflow Prime, a new no-ops, auto-tuning functionality that optimizes resource utilization and further simplifies big data processing. You might have also read that Google Dataflow is a Leader in The 2021 Forrester Wave™: Streaming Analytics, giving Dataflow a score of 5 out of 5 across 12 different criteria.  

We couldn’t be more excited about the support the community has provided to this platform. The scalability of Dataflow is unparalleled and as you set your company up for more scale, more speed, and “streaming that screams”, we suggest you take a look at what leaders at SkyRVU or Palo Alto Networks have already accomplished.

If you’re new to Dataflow, you’re in for a treat: this past month, Priyanka Vergadia (AKA CloudGirl) released a great set of resources to get you started. Read her blog here and watch her introduction video below!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WRspZRG9e90%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

Simple structure that sticks together

We thrive to be the partner of choice for your transformation journey, regardless where your data comes from and how you choose to unify your data stack.  

Our partners at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) recently released research that highlights the importance of a unifying digital fabric and how data integration services like Google Cloud Data Fusion can enable their clients to achieve this vision.

We also  announced SAP Integration with Cloud Data Fusion, Google Cloud’s native data integration platform, to seamlessly move data out of SAP Business Suite, SAP ERP and S4/HANA. To date, we provide more than 50 pipelines in Cloud Data Fusion to rapidly onboard SAP data.  

This past month, we introduced our SAP Accelerator for Order to Cash.  This accelerator is a sample implementation of the SAP Table Batch Source feature in Cloud Data Fusion and will help you get started with your end-to-end order to cash process and analytics. 

It includes sample Cloud Data Fusion pipelines that you can configure to connect to your SAP data source, perform transformations, store data in BigQuery, and set up analytics in Looker. It also comes with LookML dashboards which you can access on Github.

Countless great organizations have chosen to work with Google for their SAP data. In June, we wrote about ATB Financial’s journey and how the company uses data to better serve over 800,000 customers, save over CA$2.24 million in productivity, and realize more than CA$4 million in operating revenue through “D.E.E.P”, a data exposure enablement platform built around BigQuery.

Finally, if you are an application developer looking for a unified platform that brings together data from Firebase Crashlytics, Google Analytics, Cloud Firestore, and third party datasets, we have good news!  

This past month, we released a unified analytics platform that combines Firebase, BigQuery, Google Looker and FiveTran to easily integrate disparate data sources,  and infuse data into operational workflows for greater product development insights and increased customer experience. This resource comes with sample code, a reference guide and a great blog!  We hope you enjoy it. See you all next month!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L25Vfzr2Ciw%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

Blog

Public Cloud’s Zero Trust Architecture Keeps Enterprise Data Safe

4629

Of your peers have already read this article.

5:00 Minutes

The most insightful time you'll spend today!

Enterprises chose public cloud for the scalability, security, cost efficiency and resource benefits. In today's threat landscape, public cloud is well equipped to protect global enterprises. Read to know how Google Cloud strengthens data security!

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.

More Relevant Stories for Your Company

Blog

Trusted Collaboration for Hybrid Workplace with Google Workspace

Hybrid workspace need high levels of security, data privacy, and trust for seamless collaboration across workforce. As we navigate to the new normal, your enterprise can learn about the security and privacy specific innovations Google Workspace utilizes to help customers realize powerful, trusted, cloud-native collaboration.

E-book

Redefining and Simplifying Security Analytics

Today’s security professionals face not only an ever-expanding list of threats, old and new, but also an excruciating choice of security approaches and tools. Nearly 2000 security vendors are trying to sell to large enterprises and small businesses. Most organizations have already invested heavily in cybersecurity solutions. From firewalls to

How-to

A Security Practitioners Guide to Best Practice GCP Security

Building secure services using GCP is easy, when you know all the tools available to you. Selecting the right services and configurations to meet your security needs requires you to know your tools. In this practical session, you will go beyond the theory, and will go through best practices for

Case Study

Customer Voices: How Firms from Across Industries Leverage Google Cloud

From powering everyday operations and accelerating application innovation, to providing tools for specific business needs and executing on big ideas, to advancing the security of technology solutions, companies from across industries have leveraged Google Cloud for business benefits. Companies from across industries have turned to Google Cloud for transforming their

SHOW MORE STORIES