What is Key GCP Security Services?

Managing security in the cloud needs a different strategy due to constantly evolving threats. Therefore, risk management practices must be an important part of cloud security systems. GCP security tools are a good start for the cloud security journey.

The GCP follows a shared responsibility model for the security where customers own the security of their workloads while the service provider ensures the security of the cloud platform holistically. Even though the GCP is fairly new in the market it provides the number of security tools and capabilities to help enable cloud security.

We will explore some of the key GCP security services that can be very helpful in securing your cloud system.

Security Command Centre

• Security Command Center is a powerful tool that provides a centralized and comprehensive view of your GCP security posture, enabling you to detect and mitigate security risks in real-time.
• It allows you to view and monitor security-related information, including vulnerabilities, threats, and policy violations across your GCP projects and services.
• Asset discovery and inventory: In almost real-time, find and view your assets across App Engine, BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, Cloud Identity and Access Management, Google Kubernetes Engine, and more. Examine previous discovery scans to find assets that have been added, changed, or removed.
• Threat prevention: Know the security status of the resources you have on Google Cloud. Find out whether of your online apps running on App Engine, GKE, and Compute Engine have common web application vulnerabilities like cross-site scripting or out-of-date libraries. By clicking directly on the afflicted resource and following the provided instructions, you can quickly rectify misconfigurations.
• Threat detection: Using logs running at scale in the Google Cloud, identify dangers. Identify potential cryptomining risks as well as some of the most prevalent container attacks, such as reverse shell, suspicious binaries, and suspicious libraries. SCC offers rich auditing and reporting tools that let you monitor and examine security-related events occurring throughout your GCP environment.
  

Cloud Armour

• It helps preventing apps and websites from denial of services and web attacks. Cloud Armour offers defence against coordinated volumetric DDoS attacks that could crash your cloud workloads.
• It uses Google’s global network infrastructure to provide low-latency, high-performance protection for your applications.
• Cloud Armor integrates with Google Cloud Load Balancing, allowing you to deploy and manage your WAF policies at scale across multiple regions and backend services.
• Cloud Armor is highly scalable and can handle traffic from thousands of IP addresses simultaneously.
• Adaptive Protection: Automatically detect and help mitigate high volume Layer 7 DDoS attacks with an ML system trained locally on your applications. 
• Support for hybrid and multicloud deployments: Whether your application is built on Google Cloud, in a hybrid, or multicloud architecture, you may assist in protecting it from DDoS or web attacks and enforcing Layer 7 security regulations.
• Bot management: gives your apps automated protection against bots and, through reCAPTCHA Enterprise’s native integration, aids in preventing fraud.

Cloud Key Management

• Manage encryption keys on Google Cloud. GCP Cloud Key Management is a service that allows you to manage cryptographic keys for your cloud services and applications.
• It provides a centralized location for managing and protecting encryption keys, making it easier to implement and maintain encryption across your GCP environment.
• It offers two types of key management options, symmetric key encryption and asymmetric key encryption, to meet different cryptographic needs.
• Centrally manage encryption keys: A cloud-hosted key management service that lets you manage symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic keys for your cloud services the same way you do on-premises. You can generate, use, rotate, and destroy AES256, RSA 2048, RSA 3072, RSA 4096, EC P256, and EC P384 cryptographic keys.
• Deliver hardware key security with HSM: By pressing a button, you can quickly switch between encryption keys that are hardware- and software-protected. Perform cryptographic operations and host encryption keys in FIPS 140-2 Level 3 approved HSMs. You may safeguard your most sensitive workloads with the help of this fully managed solution without worrying about the administrative burden associated with maintaining an HSM cluster.
• Be the ultimate arbiter of access to your data: Key Access Justifications collaborates with Cloud EKM to significantly improve your data control. It is the only tool that enables you to see every encryption key request, as well as the request’s reason and a method for approving or rejecting the request’s associated decryption. The integrity promises made by Google apply to these controls.
  

Google Cloud Firewall

• Google Cloud Firewall is a network-based firewall that allows you to control network traffic to and from your GCP resources. Fully distributed, cloud-native, firewall service delivers granular control, including micro-segmentation without network re-architecting.
• Cloud Firewall is fully integrated with GCP services, allowing you to easily apply firewall rules to your GCP resources, such as VM instances and load balancers.
• Cloud Firewall allows you to create firewall rules based on IP address, protocol, and port number, and supports both stateful and stateless filtering.
• It provides logging and monitoring features, allowing you to view firewall activity and detect potential security threats in real-time.
• Cloud Firewall offers multiple layers of security, including VPC Service Controls, which allows you to create security perimeters around your Google APIs and services.
• Cloud Firewall tiers: Two levels of Cloud Firewall are available: Cloud Firewall Standard and Cloud Firewall Essentials. Cloud Firewall Standard offers expanded policies via objects for firewall rules that simplify configuration and micro-segmentation. Cloud Firewall Essentials is the foundational tier that includes Network Firewall Policies, IAM-governed Tags,etc
• Network firewall policies and hierarchical firewall policies: Network firewall policies let you group multiple firewall rules, apply batch updates, and control access to these rules with Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles. Hierarchical Firewall Policies can be applied at the organization and folder level, and Global and Regional Network Firewall Policies can be applied at the VPC level. 
  

Secret Manager

• GCP Secret Manager is a service that allows you to securely store and manage secrets, such as API keys, passwords, and certificates, for your cloud applications.
• It provides a central location to store secrets, making it easier to manage secrets and ensure their security.
• Secret Manager is integrated with other GCP services, such as Google Cloud Functions, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Google Cloud Run, making it easy to access and use secrets in your applications.
• Secret Manager provides audit logging, which provides a record of all secret usage and administrative operations, allowing you to maintain compliance with regulatory and industry standards.
• Secret Manager is designed to be highly available and scalable, so you can easily manage secrets for any size of deployment.
• Overall, GCP Secret Manager is a powerful service that provides centralized and secure management of secrets for your cloud applications. It offers a range of security features and integration with other GCP services to simplify accessing and managing secrets in your applications.