Many people believe that the safest place to store data is on a private server. They probably don’t know how secure the cloud is. Today we will look at the security of Google Cloud Platform.
What is Google Cloud Platform?
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a set of cloud computing services that Google offers to developers and businesses. It is a cloud platform offering that provides common IT infrastructure and other tools, such as data storage, databases, and networking. The platform is designed to provide scalability, security, and reliability.
It offers a wide range of products and services including the following products:
- App Engine – Google’s platform for building web apps in Python or Java,
- Compute Engine – Google’s scalable computing platform,
- Container Engine – Google’s container management service,
- Dataflow – A fully managed data processing service,
- DNS hosting – Google manages your domain name records across multiple domains (e.g., example.com and example.co),
- Firebase – A mobile and web application development platform with realtime database, storage, authentication and other services,
- Pub/Sub – A fully managed message queueing service that provides reliable messaging between systems running in the cloud or on premises.
Learn more about Google Cloud Platform here: https://fotc.com/google-cloud-platform/.
How is the Google Cloud Platform secured? GCP security fundamentals
The Google Cloud Platform is secured by many layers of security.
The first layer of security is the physical security. A data center with good physical security measures can prevent unauthorized access to the hardware and network infrastructure.
The second layer of security is the network security. Network Security prevents unauthorized access to the data in transit on any network between two points on the internet or an internal network.
The third layer of security is authentication and authorization controls which ensures that only authorized users or devices can access resources within a specific domain, for example, google’s cloud platform domain name “cloud-platform.googleapis.com”.
Google Cloud Platform has a number of security features in place to ensure that customer data is not compromised. These include:
- encryption at rest for all data stored in Google’s infrastructure,
- encryption in transit for data travelling between customer systems and Google’s infrastructure,
- an intrusion detection system which monitors the integrity of Google’s environment 24 hours a day,
- a vulnerability assessment system which monitors the state of software on Google’s infrastructure,
- a firewall which prevents unauthorized access to customer systems from outside Google’s network.
How much does GCP cost? Google Cloud Platform pricing
The prices for Google’s cloud services are determined by the type of service, the region, and the size of your project. For instance, for the Compute Engine, you need to pay per hour for usage and for the Storage, it is calculated by gigabytes per month; storage costs $0.023 per GB per month in North America and $0.026 per GB per month in Europe.