GCP Security: What It Is, Challenges, and Best Practices

The scalability and innovation the Google Cloud platform (GCP) offers remain unmatched. As an IT security analyst or cloud engineer, what worries you is GCP security. 

Issues like improper access settings, unpatched systems, and security vulnerabilities can expose sensitive data to unauthorized access. Soon, you realize managing Google Cloud security responsibilities is hard, regardless of whether you choose SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS as the cloud service model.

Let’s explore some essential strategies and best practicesto strengthen your GCP security posture and safeguard your organization's data.

GCP cloud security is a shared responsibility of Google Cloud and customers like you. While Google Cloud secures the infrastructure, it is your responsibility to secure applications running on the platform. 

What is GCP? 

GCP is a platform-as-a-service cloud vendor offering computing, storage, and networking resources on a free or pay-per-use basis. Below are some of their popular free-tier products:

• Compute Engine
• Cloud Storage
• BigQuery
• Google Kubernetes Engine
• Firestore 
• Natural Language API
• AutoML Translation

How does GCP ensure security? 

GCP uses zero trust architecture that integrates multiple security layers. Here’s how it protects data and infrastructure:

• Physical security: Google data centers secure data with multi-factor access control, 24x7 surveillance, and biometric identification systems.
• Secure service deployment: GCP lets customers use virtual private clouds to build isolated networks. This distributed cloud model, along with isolation and sandboxing, helps avoid a single point of failure and protects data from threats. Customers can also use routing or firewall policies to control IP address ranges. 
• Identity and access management (IAM): IAM relies on roles and permissions to define and monitor who uses GCP resources. It uses the principle of least privilege to provide users with the minimum level of access they need to perform their tasks.
• Storage services security: GCP API protects data by encrypting it at rest and in transit. Customers can use Google’s managed keys or cloud key management service (KMS) to manage their encryption keys. 
• Cloud audit logs: GCP also monitors and logs resource usage for compliance. You can use a cloud identity-aware proxy (IAP) to control traffic to the GCP environment. 
• Internet communication security: GCP also protocols like Google Front End (GFE) to handle external traffic and protect you from denial of service (DOS) attacks. 
• Regulatory compliance: GCP follows security standards like the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for data protection. 

Why is Google Cloud platform security important? 

Google Cloud Platform security is vital for protecting sensitive data, mitigating security threats, and ensuring service availability. 

Sensitive data protection 

Did you know that 69% of all data breaches occur because of multi-cloud security misconfigurations? Focusing on GCP security helps you protect data with encryption keys and prevent malicious leaks with data loss prevention API. Google Cloud also employs AES-256 encryption and hardware-based trusted execution environments (TEEs) to encrypt and protect data. 

Threat mitigation 

GCP security measures help you mitigate distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks that continue rising yearly. To safeguard you from high-volume attacks, Google Cloud offers tools like Cloud Armor that use layer 7 DDoS mitigation. Monitor GCP’s security command center to track asset security status and prioritize actionable risks in real time. 

Service availability 

GCP security is also essential for ensuring high availability during unexpected spikes, hardware failures, or security incidents. Google Cloud ensures data availability by using multi-regional data replication to store data copies in multiple data centers and auto-scaling to handle outages. 

Moreover, the platform prevents downtime by letting Compute Engine Live Migration move virtual machines between hosts. 

Once you understand why GCP security is critical, it’s important to know your role in maintaining it!

What is the GCP shared responsibility model?

Shared responsibility in GCP refers to Google's responsibility for its cloud network and infrastructure and customers' responsibility for access policies, securing their data, and configuring workloads. 

Your responsibility as a GCP customer 

Depending on your GCP deployment, you may be responsible for:

• Guest OS, data, and content
• Network security
• Access and authentication
• Operations
• Identity
• Web application security
• Deployment
• Usage
• Access policy
• Content

Knowing your shared responsibilities is important because each service has unique configuration options. Unless you’re fully aware of what you’re responsible for, you won’t be able to achieve better security outcomes.

Source: Google Cloud

Your GCP security responsibilities depend on your workload type and cloud services. Here’s the breakdown:

• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS): You retain most of the security responsibilities, while GCP takes care of the infrastructure and physical security. 
• Platform as a service (PaaS): You’re solely responsible for data security and client protection. GCP controls application-level controls and IAM management alongside you. 
• Software as a service (SaaS): Most security responsibilities remain with Google Cloud. You’re responsible for access controls and application data security.

GCP also emphasizes the shared fate model of cloud computing, which refers to customers using Google Cloud's attested infrastructure code and immutable controls to secure workloads. Shared fate means GCP closely interacts with customers to help them solve complex security problems with innovative solutions.

GCP security challenges and risks to consider

Customers must consider the following shared responsibility challenges while implementing GCP security methods.

Misconfiguration 

Misconfiguration is one of the main reasons behind unintended data exposure and cloud security breaches. For example, assigning broad roles like "owner" instead of restrictive roles exposes sensitive data to unauthorized access. Similarly, cloud storage buckets without proper authentication and strict access controls can expose data. 

Hybrid environment security 

Businesses using multiple cloud services often struggle with managing service-specific security controls. For example, a company using Google Compute Engine, Google Workspace, and BigQuery must understand how data flows among these services. Without it, the organization won’t be able to define security perimeters, standardize encryption methods, or spot potential misconfigurations.

Incident management 

The line between your incident management responsibilities and those of GCP can be blurry. That’s why it’s important to collaborate with Google Cloud to investigate incidents thoroughly. 

Consider using security information and event management (SIEM) tools to detect threats and deploy security policies across environments.  

Container vulnerabilities 

Neglecting security patches exposes containerized applications to vulnerabilities. Plus, deploying container images without scanning can introduce malware, especially if they are from untrusted repositories. 

GCP users must scan images, adopt automated vulnerability scanning tools in the CI/CD pipeline, and apply security patches to secure containerized environments. 

Regulatory challenges 

Compliance is another challenge for companies using GCP cloud environments. They may encounter different requirements when they enter new markets. Organizations acquiring new businesses may also notice that their acquisition hosts workloads on a different cloud. Conducting risk profile assessments and implementing new controls is crucial in these cases. 

What Google Cloud security tools does GCP offer? 

GCP offers a variety of Google Cloud security tools for identity and access management, threat detection, data protection, and compliance. Some of these are:

• IAM lets you control identities (who) and roles (can access what). You can also access single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to secure user access to applications.
• Google Cloud security scanners crawl applications to access user inputs and event handlers. These scanners are crucial for spotting vulnerabilities in App Engine, Compute Engine, and Kubernetes.
• Symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic keys are part of the Google Cloud KMS and encrypt data in the central cloud service. Google Cloud also offers scalable content inspection and de-identification to help you spot, classify, and protect sensitive information.
• The security operations suite helps with cloud logging and monitoring. Cloud logging allows you to ingest application data and log it from internal and external services. Cloud monitoring offers metrics, events, and metadata related to application health.
• Firewall Enum analyzes Google Cloud command outputs to find compute instances with vulnerable network ports that may expose sensitive data to the public Internet.
• Bucket Brute is a Python script that you can use to enumerate Google Storage buckets. It shows if those buckets have the proper access and privileges. 

How do you test Google Cloud security? 

Testing Google Cloud Platform security helps you understand whether your applications follow appropriate security measures. Let’s explore some of the approaches you can use:

Source: G2

1. Black box pentest 

Black box testing assesses an application’s functionality without prior knowledge of systems or their internal structures. On the same lines, GCP black box testing evaluates your Google Cloud applications’ security and functionality without knowing their codebases or internal configurations. The goal remains to find potential weaknesses in publicly accessible interfaces, endpoints, and APIs. 

2. White box testing 

White box pen testing or structural testing involves examining an application’s internal structure for threats and flaws. The tester will have complete knowledge of your GCP applications’ internal logic, design, source code, configurations, and architecture. 

Ultimately, you’ll find insecure coding and misconfigurations that may cause runtime errors or security vulnerabilities.

3. Gray box testing 

Gray box pen testing combines both black box and white box testing methods. Pen testers have partial knowledge of your GCP applications and services. They explore applications from an external attacker’s perspective to target and test specific functionalities, integration points, and potential vulnerabilities. 

Other Google Cloud security testing methods include:

• Network security testing tools like Nmap or Wireshark help scan open ports, map network topology, and detect network traffic anomalies.
• Application security testing tools like OWASP ZAP and Burp Suite help detect vulnerabilities like SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and cross-site request forgery (CSRF) in your GCP applications.
• Vulnerability scanning tools like OpenVAS and Qualys conduct open-source vulnerability scans and analyze container images to spot multi-cloud environment misconfigurations.

In addition to testing, implementing these best practices is essential for a secure cloud environment.

GCP security best practices 

Implementing strong security measures can help protect your applications and data. Here are key practices to follow:

• Enforce MFA for all users. MFA reduces the chances of attacks by adding an extra layer of security. You must implement MFA for anyone accessing the GCP console and APIs. 
• Secure inbound ports. Blocking unwanted traffic to your internal cloud resources is another way to secure your GCP environment. Consider enforcing ingress and egress firewall rules to restrict traffic to only necessary ports and IP ranges. You can also use VPC service controls to protect sensitive data. 
• Enable cloud logging and monitoring. Cloud audit logs for all services give you a bird's eye view of all administrative and data access activities. Consider reviewing these logs regularly to spot suspicious activities. Also, consider creating alerts for unusual activities like network traffic spikes and unauthorized access attempts. 
• Use key rotation techniques. rotate existing customer-managed keys that use an encryption algorithm to protect system data. Encryption software can generate new keys using the same algorithm and replace the existing ones. Now, use the new key to encrypt the existing data.
• Secure APIs and Endpoints. To minimize the chances of denial-of-service attacks, use quota configuration and rate limits in the API gateway. Also, consider protecting APIs with API keys and OAuth 2.0 tokens. 
• Comply with data residency requirements. Data storage and processing depend on requirements like national law, design objectives, and industry regulations. To stay compliant, meet data sovereignty and residency guidelines. 

How can Google consulting services help with GCP security? 

Google consulting services offer expertise to help you strengthen your GCP security posture. Here’s how:

Cloud security posture management

Working with a Google consulting service provider makes it easy for you to find potential sources of risks. These consultants conduct in-depth evaluations of your IAM policies, network configurations, and existing data protection methods. In the end, you get detailed recommendations and a threat mitigation roadmap to secure your GCP environment.

Custom security solutions and automation

Google consultants work with your team to customize security solutions that suit your business needs. For example, they can help with security automation using infrastructure as code (IaC) pipelines to detect and prevent potential attacks. 

You can also take their help for custom script development or third-party security tool integration. 

Implementation of best practices 

Google consulting services’ experience working with various industries gives it a unique advantage in understanding common mistakes. Whether VPC configuration, IAM role management, or firewall setting, their deep technical expertise is great for setting continuous monitoring and threat detection mechanisms. 

Incident response

GCP consultants can help your team with log analysis, root cause identification, and corrective action implementation. Work with them to conduct simulations, create incident response plans, and prepare for potential security events. 

Dodge GCP security threats like a pro

The cyber threat landscape changes every day. Being aware of the latest cloud threat intelligence and having visibility into your GCP infrastructure helps you quickly detect and respond to threats. 

Consider working with Google Cloud consulting services to prevent misconfigurations, privilege abuse, and account takeover attacks. You can also use predictive analytics to spot potential threats in the attack chain.

Learn how cloud encryption helps you secure sensitive business data from unauthorized access. 

Edited by Monishka Agrawal