In some ways, all cloud configurations offer a similar baseline of security. They’ll all have firewalls, robust network protection features and physical access control safeguarding the data center. Most will also use encryption to protect data in transit. These core features are fairly common across the industry, but Google has built on its cybersecurity capabilities to such a degree that it offers a few unique advantages over other public cloud service providers.
Let’s take a look behind the scenes and explore three of the biggest security advantages within Google Cloud services:
1. Protection against phishing
Phishing scams are among the most difficult for businesses to deal with. By targeting general users, spam emails and similar messages can exploit a single point of weakness and cause an intrusion. The best way to respond to phishing is to keep potentially harmful messages out of user inboxes.
As companies turn to G Suite and the Google Cloud, they can lean on Gmail’s powerful anti-spam tools. Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of technical infrastructure for Google, told PC Mag that the company’s vast user base and back-end systems allow it to analyze huge quantities of data and automatically protect against spam.
“Every second we mark 10 million [Gmail] messages as spam,” Hölzle said. “Gmail has over a billion active users, which means we can see pretty much any spam campaign and spend a lot of effort to train machine learning algorithms to recognize them automatically without manual intervention.”
This doesn’t mean Google is mining business emails for data. Instead, they are applying the lessons they learn from supporting millions of consumers to the organizations they work with.
2. Security by design
One of the major data protection issues facing the IT world is that technologies are built to innovate first, then security is tacked on after the fact. Google has challenged this philosophy in the cloud by setting security as the priority from day one, a Google blog explained. Among its many security accolades, Google was the first email service provider to give users SSL email by default and the first browser provider to use post-quantum cryptography.
By building with security in mind, Google has been able to put more granular, detailed solutions into the core of its architecture. The result is industry-leading solutions that beat the market to deployment and its dedicated Project Zero team, which hunts for vulnerabilities before cybercriminals can exploit them.
3. Safeguards against human error
While hackers make headlines, some of the worst and most common data breaches occur because somebody set up a system incorrectly or failed to change a default password, thus leaving data vulnerable.
Many cloud platforms, including Google, have run into these problems in the past, and the tech giant wants to put a stop to these issues. Google is now alpha testing a vulnerability scanning platform, called Cloud Security Command Center, designed to assess a company’s entire cloud ecosystem and analyze potential configuration errors and vulnerabilities, letting businesses fix human errors before they lead to data loss. The solution currently scans within App Engine deployments only.
Before taking full advantage of the Google Cloud, businesses must understand all the features and capabilities at their disposal. Dito can help you not only assess the options available but also identify which are the best fit for your business. Contact us today to learn more.
