Google Cloud Security Best Practices
You are about to solve a problem and turned to Google Cloud Platform and followed GCP security best practices to build and host your solution. You create your account and are all set to brew some coffee and sit down at your workstation to architect, code, build, and deploy. Except… you aren’t. There are many knobs you must tweak and practices to put into action if you want your solution to be operative, secure, reliable, performant, and cost effective. First things first, the best time to do that is now right from the beginning, before you start to design and engineer.
First, a word of caution: Never use a non-corporate account.
Instead, use a fully managed corporate Google account to improve visibility, auditing, and control of access to Cloud Platform resources. Don’t use email accounts outside of your organization, such as personal accounts, for business purposes.
Cloud Identity is a stand-alone Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) that gives Google Cloud users access to many of the identity management features that Google Workspace provides. It is a suite of secure cloud-native collaboration and productivity applications from Google. Through the Cloud Identity management layer, you can enable or disable access to various Google solutions for members of your organization, including Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Signing up for Cloud Identity also creates an organizational node for your domain. This helps you map your corporate structure and controls to Google Cloud resources through the Google Cloud resource hierarchy.
Let’s discuss some Google Cloud security best practices
1. Ensure your IAM (Identify & Access Management) policies are active
Like all major clouds, Google Cloud provides an Identity and Access Management (IAM) framework that you can use to define access controls for resources in your cloud environment. IAM is one of the pillars of constructing a secure cloud. To make the most of Google Cloud IAM, create rules that enforce least privilege. Least privilege means that each user can access only the specific services or resources required for their role. Avoid assigning broad sets of access rights, and grant rights to individual users rather than groups wherever possible.
You should also validate your Google Cloud IAM configurations with Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools that can detect configuration oversights or errors that may expose your cloud environment to attack.
