Google makes Cloud Security Command Center widely available

Google has made its Cloud Security Command Center (Cloud SCC) publicly available. In addition, the security management and data centre platform has received various improvements, writes ZDNet.

Cloud SCC helps Google Cloud Platform (GCP) users to manage risks in services such as App Engine, BigQuery, Cloud Storage and Compute Engine. The service was already rolled out as a beta version in December, but has now been made generally available.

One of the new versions of Cloud SCC is Security Health Analytics, which is available as an alpha version. The function automatically scans the GCP infrastructure to detect problems. These include configuration problems with public storage buckets, open firewall ports and deactivated security logging.

Cloud SCC can now also sign up for the Event Threat Detection program. This scans Stackdriver logs for suspicious activity in the GCP environment, extracts findings from them and marks them so that something can be done about them. It scans for malware, crypto mining and outbound DDoS attacks, among other things. Cloud SCC also offers new integrations with Capsule8, Cavirin, Chef, McAfee, Redlock, Stackrox, Tenable.io and Twistlock.

Policy Intelligence

Furthermore, Google announced Policy Intelligence, a product available as alpha. Policy Intelligence must provide smart access control in GCP. One of the tools in the product is IAM Recommender, which uses machine learning to help administrators remove unwanted access to GCP resources.

Access Troubleshooter in Policy Intelligence enables security administrators to understand why requests were rejected, and helps in adjusting policies to provide appropriate access. Validator allows administrators to set compliance and security limits, so administrators don’t inadvertently give too much access to a user.

G Suite

Finally, G Suite receives a series of security improvements. Access Transparency for G Suite is now widely available in G Suite Enterprise. Acces Transparency creates near real-time logs as GCP administrators communicate with data for support.

Access Approval is now available as a beta for Google Compute Engine, Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage and various other services. Access Approval was rolled out for GCP in December and allows users to give explicit permission to access data or configurations, even before GCP administrators look at it.

Enterprise users of G Suite now also have beta access to the security sandbox, which allows email attachments to be executed in a sandbox environment to find out if they are malicious.