A Complete Guide to Google Cloud Security Tools and Solutions

How Google Cloud security tools work—and where they break down

Google Cloud offers dozens of security services, but most teams struggle to know which ones to enable, when to use them, and how to handle gaps. That’s why it’s important to understand where native tools shine, where they fall short, and how to build a unified, risk-based defense using a cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) alongside the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) stack.

Google Cloud environments require a layered approach that includes the following aspects:

• Identity and access management (IAM) to act as a digital gatekeeper that meticulously controls access to your resources

• Data protection tools that secure data, both at rest and in transit, and safeguard sensitive information

• Network and application security tools that filter out malicious traffic and protect your workloads

• Threat and compliance management solutions that identify security threats and simplify regulatory compliance

Below are key Google Cloud security tools that achieve these critical aims.

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10 Google Cloud security tools and their top uses

The below tools don’t offer comprehensive security on their own, but together—and with a unified security platform—these native Google tools can help you manage your cloud security for reliability, safety, and integrity:

You can learn more about each tool below:

1. Cloud Identity

Cloud Identity is GCP’s identity as a service solution, and it provides a centralized identity management system that simplifies user management, reduces administrative overhead, and ensures consistent access policies across your entire IT infrastructure. You can use Cloud Identity to manage identities across your entire organization—including those for Google Workspace, other cloud applications, and even on-premises systems—with additional configuration.

This tool integrates with Cloud IAM to manage access by linking existing users and groups to roles that control permissions for GCP resources. While Cloud Identity manages users and groups, Cloud IAM assigns predefined or customized roles to meet your security requirements.

Cloud Identity also helps you implement single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) for additional layers of security:

• SSO: Your team can enable SSO if you’re using a Cloud Identity or Google Workspace account to access Google Cloud services. You can facilitate it for cloud apps in Google so your existing third-party provider—like Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, or Ping Identity—will handle authentication.

• MFA: You can configure Google Cloud Identity to support MFA, or two-step authentication, for additional security when users attempt to access cloud resources. Users can perform the second authentication step through a text message, phone call, or Google prompt, via the Google Authenticator app, or with security keys. Of these options, security keys are the recommended approach because they offer the most protection.

Limitation: Watch out for compromises with misconfigured IAM roles and broad permissions that can expose sensitive resources. This requires regular audits and tight management. 

Best for: Organizations that need a centralized IAM with robust security controls 

2. Google Cloud KMS

Google Cloud KMS acts as a central vault for your encryption keys. You can use KMS to generate, manage, and control access to these keys, which are essential for encrypting data at rest and in transit. 

The benefits of Google Cloud KMS include the following: 

• Flexible operation: With KMS, you can generate keys in Google Cloud, bring your own keys, or integrate with third-party external key management (EKM) systems.

• Access control: This tool allows you to set permissions outlining who can access stored keys. You can also track keys’ usage through integrations with IAM and Google Cloud Audit Logs.

• Periodic backups: KMS performs automatic backups to protect data from corruption and loss.

• Key rotation: It configures key rotation automatically when you create keys. However, users have the flexibility to adjust the default configuration to align with organizational requirements.

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Limitation: This tool relies on correct IAM configurations, so if your team doesn’t audit logging or implement broad permissions, you could risk exposure due to mismanagement. 

Best for: Companies that want centralized, reliable encryption key management that they can audit, along with strong access controls 

3. Cloud DLP

Cloud DLP—which is part of GCP’s Sensitive Data Protection—helps organizations discover and protect the sensitive data they manage. It does so through the following features:

• Predefined detectors: DLP has more than 150 predefined detectors to profile and detect sensitive data in BigQuery. You can also create your own custom detectors.

• Integration with Chronicle and SCC: By integrating DLP with SCC and Chronicle, you can leverage these tools’ combined intelligence to prioritize and investigate threats.

• Data masking: When training machine learning models, you can use DLP to mask data, prevent the misuse of sensitive information, and ensure privacy.

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Limitation: On its own, the tool lacks the granularity you’d need for full compliance. 

Best for: Organizations that need an automated discovery and protection tool for sensitive data with strong government practices

4. Google Cloud Armor

Google Cloud Armor is a GCP security service that shields web applications and services from threats like DDoS attacks and vulnerabilities like SQL injection, cross-site scripting, local file inclusion, and remote file inclusion. Because it operates at the edge of Google’s points of presence across the world, Cloud Armor can protect applications from malicious traffic before it reaches its systems.

It also provides the following security features:

• DDoS protection: Google Cloud Armor provides strong DDoS protection to mitigate volumetric, protocol, and application-layer attacks. It also uses Google’s global network to absorb and tackle large-scale attacks.

• Centralized security policies: It allows you to set up central security policies that apply to all of your web apps and services. You can then use these rules to allow or block access to your resources based on factors like IP addresses, geographic location, and other criteria.

• Scalability: Cloud Armor scales seamlessly to handle traffic spikes and neutralize DDoS attacks without impacting application performance.

• Logging and monitoring: To provide visibility into security events and cyber threats, Cloud Armor integrates seamlessly with GCP’s native logging and cloud monitoring capabilities.

Limitation: The tool lacks inspections for larger payloads (over 8KB), which can expose resources to threats. 

Best for: Companies that want a scalable cloud protection solution for common attacks (like DDoS) to supplement their other controls 

5. VPC Service Controls

Google Cloud VPC Service Controls enhances security by creating a protective boundary around GCP resources within a VPC. By regulating the egress of information from VPC networks, VPC Service Controls minimizes the risk of data exfiltration. 

The service also offers the following features:

• Context-aware access: VPC Service Controls implements context-aware access, which regulates resource access based on client attributes like device data, network IP, VPC network, and identity type.

• Data exfiltration protection: It works alongside network egress protections to stop clients that are outside defined boundaries from reaching Google-managed services.

• Dry-run mode: This tool also lets you analyze access attempts to resources in VPC networks. This allows you to observe traffic patterns and understand service usage in order to implement the right service controls without impacting authorized access.

Limitations: This solution works for Google Cloud resources but doesn’t protect them outside GCP, which makes it ineffective for multi-cloud environments.

Best for: Companies that want to minimize data exfiltration risks with strong security protections for sensitive resources 

6. IAP

IAP helps you establish application-layer authorization through IAM without depending on network firewalls. With it, users can securely access applications, either within Google Cloud or on-premises, without a VPN.

Here are some of IAP’s other benefits:

• Granular access: IAP intercepts incoming requests to your applications, verifies the user’s identity through Google Cloud Identity, and authorizes application access based on defined roles for the user.

• Zero-trust security: This tool aligns with Google Cloud’s zero-trust security model. 

• TCP forwarding: Using its TCP forwarding feature, you can access virtual machines (VMs) in Google Cloud with SSH and RDP through the public Internet. (HTTPS secures this communication.)

• Hybrid cloud support: Your team can use IAP to secure access to applications within Google Cloud, on-premises, and on other cloud platforms.

Limitations: This tool can lose its effectiveness due to misconfigured firewall rules that allow traffic from non-Google IPs. 

Best for: Companies that want zero-trust security with granular access control

7. Organization Policy Service

Google Cloud’s Organization Policy Service empowers organizations to establish and enforce policies throughout their cloud environment. These policies ensure compliance with internal guidelines, industry standards, and legal requirements.

You can count on Organization Policy Service for the following:

• Centralized policy management: As its name implies, Organization Policy Service helps with centralized policy management, which defines restrictions for how organizations use resources. This includes the location of services, resource sharing, IAM service usage, and more.

• Policy hierarchy: It facilitates the implementation of a hierarchical policy structure at the organization, folder, and project levels. This hierarchical setup gives organizations the flexibility to control policy application based on their organizational structure and specific needs.

• Predefined and custom policies: Google Cloud provides pre-built policies for common areas like resource handling, security, and access control. Additionally, organizations can craft custom policies.

This sample code shows how to create an organization policy that disables serial port access: 

{
  "name": "RESOURCE_TYPE/RESOURCE_ID/policies/gcp.disableSerialPortAccess",
  "spec": {
    "rules": [
      {
        "condition": {
          "expression": "resource.matchTag(\"ORGANIZATION_ID/disableSerialAccess\", \"yes\")"
        },
        "enforce": true
      },
      {
        "enforce": false
      }
    ]
  }
}

Limitations: Sometimes, the tool may block critical services or interrupt workflows due to misconfigured or overlapped constraints and policies. 

Best for: Security teams that want centralized security and compliance enforcement for Google Cloud assets

8. Google Cloud SCC

Google Cloud SCC is a native cloud risk and posture management service that helps businesses manage security, identify threats, and reduce data-breach risks. It also provides a clear view of all resources’ security posture within Google Cloud. 

Here are SCC’s key features:

• Compliance dashboard: As part of its Security Health Analytics, SCC offers a compliance dashboard that provides visibility into compliance status and adherence to industry standards and regulatory requirements. Using assessments of configuration settings and security controls, the dashboard allows you to track compliance with standards like PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, and SOC 2.

• Unified security view: SCC provides a centralized view of security findings, threats, and vulnerabilities across Google Cloud products and services. It does so by aggregating data from multiple sources, including on-premises, other cloud environments, and Google Cloud.

• Continuous risk engine: Its risk engine simulates attack vectors and provides rich insights and attack exposure scoring.

• Cloud identity and entitlement management (CIEM): SCC’s CIEM feature manages excessive or dormant access permissions in GCP that could pose security risks. It does so using a machine learning algorithm to analyze how your team uses permissions (including inherited permissions), which helps it identify those to revoke.

Limitations: This tool offers limited incident response capabilities, so your team would need to integrate it with other tools that can spot real-time threats and help with response.

Best for: Organizations that want continuous posture assessment with their GCP services 

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9. Chronicle SIEM

Chronicle is Google’s SIEM solution. By ingesting data from various sources, including security logs and network traffic, Chronicle pinpoints security threats and potential data breaches. 

These are some other benefits it provides:

• Threat detection: Chronicle SIEM identifies activities in your GCP resources that could indicate a data breach attempt. Its detection engine also automates the process of searching through data to identify security issues.

• Curated view: This tool can curate threat domains and present an at-a-glance view of priority alerts.

• Simplified usage: It’s available as a simple browser-based application. You can also access it through an API interface. 

Limitations: Your team may encounter limitations due to gaps in out-of-the-box detection, misconfigured access control, and alert mapping, all of which can slow down threat analysis. 

Best for: Companies that want scalable, cloud native threat detection and response with customization 

10. Google Cloud Web Security Scanner

Google Cloud Web Security Scanner is a tool that scans web applications, containers, and VMs for potential security flaws. It also helps companies identify and address vulnerabilities in their web apps. 

This tool provides the following benefits:

• Automated scanning: The tool automatically scans web applications that you host on Google App Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine, as well as Google Compute Engine instances that are accessible via public URLs. 

• OWASP Top 10 category support: Google’s Cloud Web Security Scanner aligns with OWASP’s Top 10 critical web application security risks and displays associated findings from your applications.

• False positives management: Built-in security guardrails prevent false positives, which reduces alert fatigue. (However, it’s always a good idea to incorporate other security scanners in case underreported vulnerabilities result from these guardrails.)

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Limitations: This tool is only for public URLs that use IPv4 (not IPv6 or private internal applications) and can miss vulnerabilities with underreporting and low-confidence alerts.

Best for: Security teams that want automated scanning for common vulnerabilities in Google Cloud applications

Native vs third-party tools: Which should you use?

Native tools work well in isolation, but they aren’t effective for multi-cloud, multi-team, or attack path–driven response. As a result, most GCP tools work best when you’re all-in on Google and you have the resources to manage them at scale—but that’s not always the case.

For example, an organization that uses Cloud DLP, KMS, and SCC can still miss a misconfigured bucket that exposes PII because none of these tools provide a unified view of data, identity, and exposure. 

The limitations your team will face with these native tools include the following:

• Alert fatigue: Each tool provides an abundance of alerts and data that can be overwhelming when your security team has to juggle them all at once. This causes fatigue that could result in missing potential threats. 

• Multi-cloud limits: These solutions are helpful for Google Cloud Security—but what about your other cloud environments? Mixing and matching tools to manage your cloud infrastructure leaves room for serious vulnerabilities, especially when your tools don’t talk to each other.

• Compliance complexity: It’s not easy to enforce regulatory compliance when you’re dealing with several frameworks and trying to manually map your controls across different native tools. Instead, it becomes time consuming and prone to error.

• Incomplete vulnerability assessment and remediation guidance: Scattered tools and a security stack with gaps mean you’ll have limited coverage across your resources and will miss vulnerabilities. Even if your solutions do spot an issue, siloed tips create fragmented approaches for remediation. Instead, you need holistic, actionable steps that benefit your entire environment. 

• Intensive management: As you deal with multiple Google-native security tools, you’ll require more resource-intensive processes over time. You may also need to switch up the tools and strategies you use. 

The key to solving these challenges is a unified approach. With a CNAPP, you can get contextualized alerts, multi-cloud security management, unified dashboards, compliance frameworks, and a focused security approach—all in one platform. 

Enhancing Google Cloud security with Wiz’s CNAPP

Wiz doesn’t replace your Google security tools. Instead, it stitches them together and closes the gaps between them. That way, your teams can prioritize what matters by connecting cloud context, identity, data sensitivity, and real exposure across GCP and other clouds.

With our CNAPP, you’ll get comprehensive security for GCP, along with other leading cloud providers. This industry-leading solution also includes the following features:

• Cloud security posture management: Wiz offers an agentless design that simplifies deployment and reduces operational overhead, all while providing 100% visibility across cloud environments. It scans VMs, serverless resources, databases, data repositories, and other PaaS solutions, whether you’re using GCP alone or have a multi-cloud strategy.

• Centralized visibility: The platform’s graph-based system helps you spot and understand threats right away, which allows your organization to make quick, data-driven security decisions.

• Cloud detection and response: The contextual information that Wiz provides lets you correlate threats and enables real-time remediation. That way, you can monitor workloads across multiple cloud platforms to identify malicious behaviors and leverage out-of-the-box playbook integration to respond to incidents.

• Data security posture management: By constantly scanning for possible data exposure paths, Wiz protects your personally identifiable information, protected health information, and payment card industry data.

Simply put, Wiz helps you take proactive measures to secure your data and reduce the likelihood of breaches by identifying possible exposure paths. Schedule a demo today to learn more.

Want to dig deeper into how to improve your Google Cloud security right now? Download our Google Cloud Security Best Practices Cheat Sheet to discover how.

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