Is an electricity provider’s supply chain its weakest link in the event of a cyberattack? The evidence is compelling that third parties often play unwitting roles. For example, the NotPetya ransomware attacks in mid-2017 originally gained a foothold via a backdoor in third-party accounting software. To safeguard North America’s electricity supply, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) has issued several critical infrastructure protection (CIP) standards.

Previously we published an article discussing some of the best practices surrounding cloud security, in this article, we will discuss cloud a little more specifically by focusing on one in particular provider Google. Google offers several different solutions for customers known as GCP or the Google Cloud Platform. GCP is set infrastructure tools and services which customers can utilize to build environments they need in order to facilitate a solution for their business.

In the previous posts of this series, we discussed how you can secure your infrastructure at scale by applying security policies as code to continuously monitor your environment with the Config Validator policy library and Forseti. In this article, we’ll discuss how you can reuse the exact same policies and Terraform Validator to preventively check your infrastructure deployments, and block bad resources from being deployed in Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) is a law that implements regulations on publicly traded companies and accounting firms. SOX was created to improve the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures in financial statements and to protect investors from fraudulent accounting practices.

Vendor risk management is the practice of governing third-party access to company data. This is a critical aspect of an organization since vendors view your business information when providing their services. For some, this can turn into a severe vulnerability that can lead to data breaches. In fact, in the past five years, vendors like Home Depot and Target were responsible for those incidents, as reported by Forbes.

No two Google Cloud environments are the same, and how you protect them isn’t either. In previous posts, we showed you how to use the Config Validator scanner in Forseti to look for violations in your GCP infrastructure by writing policy constraints and scanning for labels. These constraints are a good way for you to translate your security policies into code and can be configured to meet your granular requirements.

What do healthcare, banking, and the insurance industry all have in common? RISK! Regardless of industry, having an application, or system compromised could mean the exposure of extremely sensitive information. If such information became public knowledge your business could suffer tremendously. For many companies, a data breach is the worst possible situation imaginable. How does an organization work to reduce the impact of a system being compromised?

Welcome back to our series on best practices for managing and securing your Google Cloud infrastructure at scale. In a previous post, we talked about how to use the open-source tools Forseti and Config Validator to scan for non-compliant tools in your environment. Today, we’ll go one step further and show you another best practice for security operations: the systematic use of labels.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) designates management review controls (MRCs) as one of the required internal controls. MRCs are the reviews of key financial information conducted by a company’s management to assess its reasonableness and accuracy. They are a key aspect of a public company’s internal control over financial reporting (ICFR).

One of the greatest challenges customers face when onboarding in the cloud is how to control and protect their assets while letting their users deploy resources securely. In this series of four articles, we’ll show you how to start implementing your security policies at scale on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The goal is to write your security policies as code once and for all, and to apply them both before and after you deploy resources in your GCP environment.