How to Protect Your Data With Google Cloud Platform
Nearly half of the world’s leading companies are planning to increase their investments in cloud tools due to the economic climate. These numbers not only confirm an ongoing trend but also show how cloud tools have significantly changed the way businesses operate worldwide.
In this context, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) stands out with its set of tools and features.
However, when it comes to the most critical aspect of business—security—does GCP have a solution to offer?
In this article, we will dive deeper into this question, exploring the key benefits of GCP for businesses, examining the challenges posed by the cloud environment, and showcasing three GCP use cases that contribute to data protection.
What is GCP?
Google Cloud Platform is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google, comprising infrastructure, storage, analytics, machine learning, and more. GCP provides a flexible and scalable environment for businesses to build, deploy, and manage applications efficiently.
Benefits of GCP for companies across various industries
GCP presents a variety of advantages built to meet the growing needs of companies across different industries:
GCP is scalable and flexible
GCP allows businesses to adjust their infrastructure based on demand, enabling them to flexibly adapt to changing requirements. This is particularly beneficial for industries with fluctuating workloads, such as e-commerce and entertainment.
GCP provides advanced analytics and machine learning
GCP’s data processing and AI services empower industries such as finance and healthcare to strategically leverage them for specific tasks, such as extraction of insights from massive datasets, driving informed decision-making.
GCP assists in high-performance and intelligent tasks
GCP’s high-performance computing capabilities play a crucial role in advancing Research and Development (R&D) industries. The infrastructure offered by GCP supports sophisticated simulations, extensive data analysis, and scientific research, fostering innovation in these fields.
Challenges of the cloud environment and potential solutions
While the cloud represents a plethora of opportunities and features, it also introduces challenges that organizations must confront, especially in ensuring data security.
Here is a list of the most common challenges and initiatives that companies can undertake to address them:
Data privacy concerns
Companies implementing GCP often express concerns about the privacy of their data when stored in the cloud. Addressing this challenge involves several strategies, including implementing transparent data privacy policies, adhering to relevant regulations, and ensuring robust encryption practices. Another crucial measure a company can take is regularly communicating privacy measures to employees to enhance transparency and trust.
Access management concerns
As an organization grows, the complexity of managing access controls also increases. It becomes crucial to guarantee that only authorized individuals have access to specific resources, all while preserving flexibility for collaborative efforts. This requires meticulous configuration and continuous maintenance of identity and access management. Conducting regular audits and updates of permissions, implementing role-based access controls, and offering training for administrators will ensure the proper adherence to access control measures.
Data encryption concerns
Although encryption plays a vital role in ensuring data security, it may result in increased computational overhead. Thoughtful evaluation of your application’s specific requirements will help your company successfully address the challenge of balancing encryption needs with system performance. This balance can be achieved by leveraging hardware acceleration, optimizing encryption algorithms, and adopting a strategic approach that focuses on encrypting only the most sensitive data.
How Google Cloud Platform helps in protecting data
Use case 1: Financial companies
Financial companies often deal with sensitive information.
GCP complies with various industry standards and certifications, such as PCI DSS, SOC 2, and ISO 27001, ensuring that the platform adheres to strict security and compliance requirements.
Here are the various ways in which GCP can assist in enhancing the data protection practices of a financial organization:
- Cloud Key Management Service (KMS) enables financial organizations to manage cryptographic keys for their cloud services securely.
- Role-based access controls (RBAC) can be implemented to define and enforce permissions based on job responsibilities, reducing the risk of unauthorized access.
- GCP offers tools that help financial companies prevent the inadvertent exposure of sensitive information. It can scan and classify data to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and internal policies.
- GCP allows financial organizations to establish private, dedicated connections to the cloud through features like Cloud VPN or Cloud Interconnect, ensuring secure communication between on-premises infrastructure and cloud resources.
Use case 2: Healthcare organizations
GCP complies with several industry standards and certifications, including HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), which is crucial for healthcare companies handling protected health information (PHI). The adherence to these certifications ensures a strong foundation for data security and regulatory compliance.
- Google Cloud’s Healthcare API provides a secure and interoperable platform for managing healthcare data. It supports FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standards, allowing healthcare companies to exchange and integrate health data securely.
- The encryption mechanisms that safeguard data both at rest and in transit is another noteworthy feature of GCP. Healthcare companies can leverage encryption features to safeguard patient data and maintain confidentiality.
- GCP offers tools like Cloud Audit Logging and Cloud Monitoring, allowing healthcare companies to monitor and log activities within their cloud environment. This helps in tracking access, detecting unusual behavior, and responding promptly to potential security incidents.
Use case 3: E-commerce companies
Here are several ways in which GCP supports data protection for e-commerce businesses:
- GCP sticks to top-notch security standards and certifications, including PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). This is crucial for e-commerce companies handling payment transactions, ensuring that their infrastructure meets the necessary security requirements.
- GCP offers Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection to mitigate the risk of malicious attacks that could disrupt e-commerce services. This contributes to the accessibility of online stores, particularly during periods of high website traffic.
- GCP’s Web Application Firewall (WAF) helps protect e-commerce websites from common web application vulnerabilities and attacks. It can filter and monitor HTTP traffic between a web application and the internet, providing an additional layer of security.
To sum it up
From the flexibility that Google Cloud Platform tools offer to meet the dynamic needs of industries such as e-commerce, to the analytics and machine learning capabilities that drive decisions in finance and healthcare, GCP stands out as a proven tool to safeguard a company’s most precious asset—its data.
With Kanda’s expertise in cloud solutions management, our customers can ensure the effective implementation of transparent data privacy policies, robust access controls, and other security measures outlined in the article.
Our extensive experience, particularly with healthcare organizations, coupled with the profound understanding of the regulatory landscape, is an asset that your company shouldn’t overlook.