Google is making news this morning with changes to its cloud security system that may or may not impress cybersecurity wonks, but likely signal where the industry is going in the future.
Sage Lazzaro at VentureBeat reports a spate of improvements, including an intrusion detection system, various integrations and an “autonomic security operation stack” are changing the way Google approaches its cloud security with cloud-native tools that are designed to handle things like dwell time and threat management.
However, looking into the underlying press release on which many of the tech reports are based, it turns out that although there is a lengthy description of these cloud services, there’s quite a lot of jargon and ambiguity and relatively few technical details in some places.
Calling the initiative a “hard reset” for Google’s security platform, Google Cloud VP Sunil Potti characterizes the changes as creating an “invisible security” infrastructure.
There is a feature called Cloud IDS for incident detection that Google maintains has low false positives and “custom workflows for taking remediative action.” There are SIEM and SOAR solutions and alerts.
Beyond that, much of the detail in this section of the press release centers around Google’s Chronicle cloud-native security analytics system.
Potti also writes about Google’s addressing “shared fate” with enhancements to its Risk Protection program.
Essentially, says Jon Oltsik, Senior Principal Analyst and Fellow, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) as quoted in Potti’s blog post, Google wants to “replicate on-premises security in the cloud.”
Each of these feature descriptions, principles and elaborations on trendsetting Google security technology are somewhat illuminative, but also somewhat vague. Perusing the internal description of the entire cloud suite may leave more technical readers craving more details. We get the list of integrations, but not a lot more in-depth explanation of how many aspects of the system work.
Regardless, Google is clearly upping its game when it comes to cloud cybersecurity, and that’s something that’s valuable in today’s market. Look for the market impact of new Google changes for this member of the elite FAANG stock market group – and don’t forget to also track the leader of another FAANG stock, Jeff Bezos, as he launches into space!
