Google's Cloud Security Command Center Takes Watch At Google Cloud Next

The platform delivers a unified view of the threat landscape across a Google deployment by ingesting signals from Google services and security partners

Google shipped its Cloud Security Command Center on Wednesday, empowering enterprise customers with a consolidated view of threat signals from various Google Cloud services and third-party security vendors.

"This is a tool for us to organize and visualize all the threat events," Vineet Bhan, head of security partnerships for Google Cloud, told CRN at the Google Next '19 conference in San Francisco.

Google Cloud Security Command Center has been available through an alpha program since its introduction at Google's CEO Security Forum in March of 2018. Google expects adoption to scale quickly with the wide release, which upgraded capabilities, Bhan said.

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Thirteen security vendors are launch partners in an integration program, including Capsule8, Cavirin, Chef, McAfee, Redlock, Stackrox, Tenable.io, and Twistlock.

The system also monitors Google Stackdriver logs in protecting customer data across App Engine, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, and Google Kubernetes Engine.

"The vision is it will take signals from different Google products, and from partner products, so customers have one visualization framework," Bhan said. "All threats will be visible in a dashboard for customers to look at."

That consolidated view will make it easier for customers to manage their security posture and respond to threats. Multiple solutions, and the abundance of alarms they create, is one of the most challenging elements of locking down systems, Bhan said.

Anupam Sahai, vice president of strategy and business development at Cavirin, told CRN his company, as a launch partner, has been working to develop a deep integration with Google's new platform.

The Cloud Security Command Center makes data from Cavirin's risk and compliance management solution, which delivers cybersecurity posture scoring, more actionable in securing hybrid cloud deployments, Sahai said.

Shannon Rush, principal for cloud architecture at Maven Wave, a large Google Cloud partner headquartered in Chicago, said Cloud Security Command Center, while free to customers, will likely create new opportunities for Google's channel to sell services.

"I would imagine we'll be taking advantage of at least the first-party signaling and some of the third-party stuff for our customers," Rush told CRN. "We'll probably wrap some best-practices automation and include that in some of our foundational offerings."

The platform will also make it easier for partners to protect their customers.

"The promise is it's going to be a single pane of glass for all the security signals that happen inside of Google's cloud. They'll get dumped into a single place where you can wrap intelligence and automation around those signals," Rush told CRN.

Partners responsible for protecting their clients' infrastructure will be able to query against security data and take automated actions to remediate threats, he said.

"Event correlation becomes a lot easier when you have all your data in one place," Rush said. "Overall it's going to increase customers' security posture and create a lot of opportunity for us to do automation and custom work for customers to realize their security use cases."