'Custom roles' gives cloud administrators the ability to give users the permissions they need to do their jobs – and only those permissions.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

October 3, 2017

2 Min Read
Google Steps Up Insider Threat Protection

Google is making it easier for cloud security administrators to protect against insider threats and enhance user productivity, by granting users the permissions they need to do their jobs -- and only those permissions.

Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) has today introduced custom roles for Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM), allowing enterprises to control 1,287 public permissions across Google Cloud Platform services.

"This helps administrators grant users the permissions they need to do their jobs -- and only those permissions," according to a post on the Google Cloud Platform blog scheduled to go live Tuesday. "Fine-grained access controls help enforce the principle of least privilege for resources and data on GCP. "

Figure 1: Photo by Tobias Haase from Hanover, Germany (Google, Mountain View, California) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons Photo by Tobias Haase from Hanover, Germany (Google, Mountain View, California) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

IAM offers the roles of Owner, Editor and Viewer for GCP users. Google calls those "primitive roles." Additionally, Google provides more than 100 "predefined roles" with sets of permissions needed to complete different tasks on GCP. "For example, the Cloud SQL Viewer predefined role combines 14 permissions necessary to allow users to browse and export databases."

"Custom roles complement the primitive and predefined roles when you need to be even more precise," according to the blog post, which is signed by Rohit Kare, GCP product manager. "For example, an auditor may only need to access a database to gather audit findings so they know what data is being collected, but not to read the actual data or perform any other operations."

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— Mitch Wagner Follow me on Twitter Visit my LinkedIn profile Visit my blog Follow me on Facebook Editor, Enterprise Cloud News

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About the Author(s)

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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