EP140 System Hardening at Google Scale: New Challenges, New Solutions

Cloud Security Podcast by Google

Guest:

• Andrew Hoying, Senior Security Engineering Manager @ Google

Topics:

• What is different about system hardening today vs 20 years ago?

• Also, what is special about hardening systems at Google massive scale?

• Can I just apply CIS templates and be done with it?

• Part of hardening has to be following up with developers after they have un-hardened things – how do we operationalize that at scale without getting too much in the way of productivity?

• A part of hardening has got to be responding to new regulation and compliance regimes, how do you incorporate new controls and stay responsive to the changing world around us?

• Are there cases where we have taken lessons from hardening at scale and converted those into product improvements?

• What metrics do you track to keep your teams moving, and what metrics do your leads look at to understand how you’re doing? [Spoiler: the answer here is VERY fun!]

Resources:

• “Why Shared Fate is a Better Way to Manage Cloud Risk” article (and this too)

• CIS for GCP

• GCP IAM Deny

• CloudSecList by Marco Lancini