Much of the cybersecurity conversation over the past year about AI has focused on how AI creates new risks and empowers attackers. Although acknowledging that there are some concerns, Google Cloud's 2024 cyber strategy contradicts this, arguing that disruption can lead to positive change.
“Ultimately, there is no shortage of long-term security issues — and our work with AI shows that the technology has tremendous potential to help,” Charlie Snyder, Google's head of security policy, wrote in a recent blog post. “There is still more work to be done to ensure the safety of AI technology, but if we focus only on the risks that need to be avoided, we will never be able to realize its transformative potential,” he wrote.
At the Google Cloud Next '24 conference, the company introduced a slew of new services and capabilities to support artificial intelligence. The event included a partner summit targeting the cloud giant's resellers, MSSP and system integrator partners.
“Generative AI offers tremendous potential to tip the scales in favor of defenders, and we continue to infuse AI-driven capabilities into our products,” Sunil Butte, vice president and general manager of Google Cloud Security, wrote in unveiling new capabilities across its security portfolio.
List of security offerings from Google
Here is the lineup of offers:
Gemini in Security Operations: Investigation Assist guides analysts through their workflow wherever they are in Chronicle Enterprise and Chronicle Enterprise Plus. Generally available at the end of April. Gemini in Threat Intelligence: Conversational search across Mandiant's repository of threat intelligence straight from frontline investigations. Now in preview.Gemini's Security Command Center: Offers preview features that allow security teams to search for threats and other security events using natural language.
Previews of new capabilities in Gemini Cloud Assist
IAM Recommendations: Provides contextual recommendations for removing roles from users with excessive permissions or service accounts to help leverage your IAM posture and reduce risk exposure. Key Insights: Provides assistance during encryption key generation based on its understanding of the data, encryption preferences, and compliance needs. Confidential Computing Insights: Recommends options to add confidential computing protection for highly sensitive workloads based on data and compute usage.
Defenses of the new establishment
Chrome Enterprise Premium: Combines Chrome with Google Threat and Data Protection, Zero Trust access controls, enterprise policy controls, and security insights and reporting. Now generally available.
Threat intelligence
Applied Threat Intelligence in Google Security Operations: Through Threat Visibility, it helps security operations teams detect more threats using up-to-date threat intelligence to address them before they cause damage or loss.
Cloud risk management
Security Command Center Enterprise Cloud: A new risk management solution that unifies proactive cloud security and enterprise security operations. Provides security teams with a single view of situational controls, active threats, cloud identities, and data. Generally available now. Mandiant Hunt for Security Command Center Enterprise: Provides on-demand human expertise that can become an extension of homeland security operations teams. Hundreds of elite-level analysts and researchers are available upon request. Now in preview.
Updated cloud security capabilities for identity and access management
Privileged Access Manager (PAM): Helps customers transition from permanent, permanent privileges to on-demand access through timely, time-bound, consent-based access increments. Now available in preview. Principal Access Limit (PAB): Enables security administrators to impose restrictions on IAM managers so that they can only access authorized resources within specified defined limits. Now available in preview.
For network security
Cloud First NGFW Enterprise: This next-generation firewall includes threat protection powered by Palo Alto Networks with a distributed architecture that can provide granular control at the workload level. Now generally available.Cloud Armor Enterprise: Offers a pay-as-you-go model that includes advanced network DDoS protection, web application firewall capabilities, network edge policy, adaptive protection, and threat intelligence to help protect your cloud applications and services. Now generally available.
For data security
Secret Accelerators: For AI and ML workloads, Google Cloud supports Intel AMX technology, which provides CPU-based acceleration by default on Secret C3 Series virtual machines. Confidential Compute will also be coming to A3 VMs with NVIDIA H100 GPUs in preview later this year. The Confidential Computing portfolio now includes Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA hardware. Now in preview and available on C3 series devices with Intel TDX. Sensitive data protection integration with Cloud SQL: Deeply integrated into the Security Command Center Enterprise risk engine. High-value assets can be identified, database vulnerabilities analyzed, and real-world attack scenarios simulated that can proactively address risks and protect data. Generally available now. Key Management with Autokey: Simplifies the process of creating and managing client encryption keys (CMEK) by ensuring that the correct key type is used for each resource. Now in preview. Expanded regions available for bare metal security module deployments: Allows users to deploy their HSMs in PCI-compliant facilities with your Google Cloud workloads.
For structured cloud offerings
Regional controls for asserted workloads: They can enforce data residency for client content at rest, provide transparency of administrative access, as well as restrict and monitor compliant service. Regional controls are available at no additional cost. Available in 32 cloud regions in 14 countries. Now under preview. Audit Manager: Can help customers simplify their compliance audit process by automating control verification with proof of compliance for their workloads and data on Google Cloud. Now in preview.
