Google Cloud on Tuesday announced a new set of products targeted to help federal, state, and local governments deploy a zero-trust architecture as identified in the Biden administration’s executive order on cybersecurity.
Mike Daniels, vice president of Google Cloud Global Public Sector, said the new offerings will help governments agencies in three ways: accelerate their journey to a zero-trust architecture, deliver solid cyber analytics and diagnosis, and enhance an agency’s ability to rapidly recover from an attack.
“When you parse the EO, we think it really comes down to these three areas,” Daniels said, adding that the experience the nation had with the pandemic, work-from-home and major security events like SolarWinds and Colonial Pipeline was “a good reminder on the need for top-level security, infrastructure, securing third-party vendors, and eliminating reliance on a single cloud vendor as resilience became really important.”
In response to the Biden EO, Google Cloud launched the following products:
- Zero Trust Assessment and Planning: Daniels said everyone wants to build a zero-trust architecture, but people don’t know always how to get started. Delivered through Google Cloud’s professional services organization (PSO), the assessment and planning tool offers agencies a set of workshops that help them plan zero trust strategies for their core applications and data in cloud-based, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
- Secure Application Access Anywhere: Offered in partnership with Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud’s PSO, this product helps agencies more effectively deploy and manage containers built to deliver secure access and monitoring for applications in both cloud and on-premises environments. A recent successful prototype was completed with the DOD’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU).
- Active Cyber Threat Detection: Offers threat hunting and intelligence tools to enhance incident response. Delivered through Fishtech CYDERES, the products aims to help government organizations more readily analyze their historic and current log data to detect threats faster.
