Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer allows organizations to create and implement a secure foundation on the Google Cloud Platform. Also, through knowledge of security best applications and industry security specifications, this individual can design, develop, and manages a secure infrastructure leveraging Google security technologies.
Further, the Cloud Security Professional should be skilled in all perspectives of Cloud Security including maintaining the identity and access superintendence, establishing organizational structure and policies, utilizing Google technologies to present data protection, collecting and analyzing Google Cloud Platform logs, configuring network security defenses, operating incident responses, and perception of regulatory concerns.
Let us list down the reasons why the candidate should opt for this exam!
- GCP is the most significant global demand.
- Also, the high confirmation rate of Google cloud services by corporations.
- Further, the absence of cloud expertise is recognized as the #1 difficulty with cloud adoption by 25% of organizations. There’s definitely a shortage of certified Google cloud professionals available today.
- In addition, connecting Google Cloud Platform certifications with additional certifications to develop skill sets and improve salaries even more.
Exam Format
Let us now directly move to the exam format, scheduling, registering, etc.
The Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer (GCP) exam comprises multiple choice and multiple select questions that need to be answered in a time frame of 2 hours.
- Additionally, there are no mandatory prerequisites for the exam; however, Google recommends having at least 3 years of industry experience, including 1 year of experience in designing and managing solutions using GCP.
- Additionally, the Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer (GCP) Exam is available in English and Japanese language.
- Moreover, the cost of taking the exam is $200 plus taxes wherever applicable.
Registering the Exam!
To book the exam, the candidate can go to the Official Google Cloud website.
- The candidate will need a Web assessor account. They are supposed to create one in order to register themselves for the exam. To create, click here
- Create the account with their personal email address and not their work address.
- Browse the catalog and sign up for the desired exam.
- Select the exam center, like the Kryterion Testing Centre.
- Once registered for an exam, schedule a convenient exam time at a nearby Kryterion testing center. Find the nearest testing center using this link.
Furthermore, if the candidate doesn’t pass the certification exam, they can take it again after 14 days. Similarly, if you don’t pass the second time, you must wait 60 days. Further, if they don’t pass the third attempt, they will have to wait a year before trying again. Most importantly, candidates need to make a payment each time they take an exam. It’s crucial to remember that all Google Cloud certifications remain valid for two years from the certification date. Therefore, to uphold their certification status and certificate number, candidates must recertify within this timeframe.
Course Structure
Now that we have a clearer picture of the necessary details, let’s delve into the exam outline. Take a quick look at the topics that must be covered for the exam, and pay attention to:
Topic 1: Configuring access (27%)
1.1 Managing Cloud Identity. Considerations include:
- Configuring Google Cloud Directory Sync and third-party connectors (Google Documentation: Set up Integration Connectors)
- Management of super administrator account (Google Documentation: Super administrator account best practices, Creating and managing organizations)
- Automating the user lifecycle management process (Google Documentation: Object Lifecycle Management)
- Administering user accounts and groups programmatically (Google Documentation: Managing users programmatically)
- Configuring Workforce Identity Federation (Google Documentation: Configure Workforce Identity Federation)
1.2 Managing service accounts. Considerations include:
- Securing and protecting service accounts (including default service accounts) (Google Documentation: Best practices for using service accounts)
- Identification of scenarios requiring service accounts (Google Documentation: Understanding service accounts, Service accounts)
- Creating, disabling, and authorizing service accounts (Google Documentation: Disable and enable service accounts)
- Securing, auditing and mitigating the usage of service account keys (Google Documentation: Best practices for managing service account keys)
- Managing and creating short-lived credentials (Google Documentation: Create short-lived credentials for a service account)
- Configuring Workload Identity Federation (Google Documentation: Configure Workload Identity Federation with AWS or Azure)
- Managing service account impersonation (Google Documentation: Service account impersonation)
1.3 Managing authentication.
- Creating a password and session management policy for user accounts
- Setting up Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and OAuth (Google Documentation: Signing in users with SAML)
- Configuring and enforcing two-step authentication (Google Documentation: Multi-factor authentication (MFA))
1.4 Managing and implementing authorization controls. Considerations include:
- Managing privileged roles and separation of duties with Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and permissions (Google Documentation: Separation of duties and Identity and Access Management roles)
- Managing IAM and access control list (ACL) permissions (Google Documentation: Access control lists (ACLs))
- Granting permissions to different types of identities, including using IAM conditions and IAM deny policies (Google Documentation: IAM Overview)
- Designing identity roles at the organization, folder, project, and resource level (Google Documentation: Using resource hierarchy for access control)
- Configuring Access Context Manager (Google Documentation: Access Context Manager Overview)
- Applying Policy Intelligence for better permission management (Google Documentation: Policy Intelligence overview)
- Managing permissions through groups (Google Documentation: Manage access to projects, folders, and organizations)
1.5 Defining resource hierarchy.
- Creating and managing organizations (Google Documentation: Creating and managing organizations)
- Managing organization policies for organization folders, projects, and resources (Google Documentation: Creating and managing organization policies)
- Using resource hierarchy for access control and permissions inheritance (Google Documentation: Using resource hierarchy for access control)
Topic 2: Securing communications and establishing boundary protection (21%)
2.1 Designing and configuring perimeter security. Considerations include:
- Configuring network perimeter controls (firewall rules, hierarchical firewalls, Identity-Aware Proxy [IAP], load balancers, and Certificate Authority Service) (Google Documentation: Setting up IAP for Compute Engine, Using IAP for TCP forwarding)
- Differentiating between private and public IP addressing (Google Documentation: IP addresses)
- Configuring web application firewall (Google Cloud Armor) (Google Documentation: Google Cloud Armor preconfigured WAF rules overview)
- Deploying Secure Web Proxy (Google Documentation: Deploy a Secure Web Proxy instance)
- Configuring Cloud DNS security settings (Google Documentation: Manage DNSSEC configuration)
- Continually monitoring and restricting configured APIs (Google Documentation: Introduction to the Cloud Monitoring API)
2.2 Configuring boundary segmentation. Considerations include:
- Configuring security properties of a VPC network, VPC peering, Shared VPC, and firewall rules (Google Documentation: VPC Network Peering)
- Configuring network isolation and data encapsulation for N-tier application design (Google Documentation: Best practices and reference architectures for VPC design)
- Configuring VPC Service Controls (Google Documentation: Overview of VPC Service Controls)
2.3 Establish private connectivity.
- Designing and configuring private connectivity between VPC networks and Google Cloud projects (Shared VPC, VPC peering, and Private Google Access for on-premises hosts) (Google Documentation: Configure Private Google Access for on-premises hosts)
- Designing and configuring private connectivity between data centers and VPC network (HA-VPN, IPsec, MACsec, and Cloud Interconnect) (Google Documentation: Cloud Interconnect overview)
- Establishing private connectivity between VPC and Google APIs (Private Google Access, Private Google Access for on-premises hosts, restricted Google access, Private Service Connect) (Google Documentation: Configuring Private Google Access, Private access options for services)
- Using Cloud NAT to enable outbound traffic (Google Documentation: Cloud NAT overview)
Topic 3: Ensuring data protection (20%)
3.1 Protecting sensitive data and preventing data loss. Considerations include:
- Inspecting and redacting personally identifiable information (PII) (Google Documentation: Classification, redaction, and de-identification, De-identifying sensitive data)
- Ensuring continuous discovery of sensitive data (structured and unstructured)
- Configuring pseudonymization (Google Documentation: Pseudonymization)
- Configuring format-preserving substitution (Google Documentation: Transformation reference)
- Restricting access to BigQuery, Cloud Storage, and Cloud SQL datastores (Google Documentation: Restrict access with column-level access control)
- Securing secrets with Secret Manager Secret Manager overview)
- Protecting and managing compute instance metadata About VM metadata)
3.2 Managing encryption at rest, in transit, and in use. Considerations include:
- Understanding the use cases for Google default encryption, customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) including customer-supplied encryption keys (CSEK), Cloud External Key Manager (EKM), and Cloud HSM (Google Documentation: Encrypt disks with customer-supplied encryption keys, Customer-Supplied Encryption Keys, Customer managed encryption keys (CMEK))
- Creating and managing encryption keys for CMEK, CSEK, and EKM (Google Documentation: Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK))
- Applying Google’s encryption approach to use cases (Google Documentation: Encryption in transit)
- Configuring object lifecycle policies for Cloud Storage (Google Documentation: Object Lifecycle Management)
- Enabling Confidential Computing (Google Documentation: Confidential VM)
3.3 Planning for security and privacy in AI. Considerations include:
- Implementing security controls for AI/ML systems (e.g., protecting against unintentional exploitation of data or models) (Google Documentation: Preventing Data Exfiltration)
- Determining security requirements for IaaS-hosted and PaaS-hosted training models
Topic 4: Managing operations (22%)
4.1 Automating infrastructure and application security. Considerations include:
- Automating security scanning for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) through a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline (Google Documentation: Automatically scan workloads for known vulnerabilities)
- Configuring Binary Authorization to secure GKE clusters or Cloud Run (Google Documentation: Enable Binary Authorization for Cloud Run)
- Automating virtual machine image creation, hardening, maintenance, and patch management (Google Documentation: About Patch)
- Automating container image creation, verification, hardening, maintenance, and patch management (Google Documentation: Image management best practices)
- Managing policy and drift detection at scale (custom organization policies and custom modules for Security Health Analytics) (Google Documentation: Using custom modules with Security Health Analytics)
4.2 Configuring logging, monitoring, and detection. Considerations include:
- Configuring and analyzing network logs (firewall rule logs, VPC flow logs, packet mirroring, Cloud Intrusion Detection System [Cloud IDS], Log Analytics) (Google Documentation: VPC Flow Logs, Cloud IDS)
- Designing an effective logging strategy
- Logging, monitoring, responding to, and remediating security incidents (Google Documentation: Data incident response process)
- Designing secure access to logs (Google Documentation: Best practices for Cloud Audit Logs)
- Exporting logs to external security systems (Google Documentation: Scenarios for exporting Cloud Logging: Compliance requirements)
- Configuring and analyzing Google Cloud audit logs and data access logs (Google Documentation: Enable Data Access audit logs)
- Configuring log exports (log sinks and aggregated sinks) (Google Documentation: Collate and route organization- and folder-level logs to supported destinations)
- Configuring and monitoring Security Command Center (Google Documentation: Configure Security Command Center services)
Topic 5: Supporting compliance requirements (10%)
5.1 Determining regulatory requirements for the cloud. Considerations include:
- Determining concerns relative to compute, data, and network
- Evaluating the security shared responsibility model (Google Documentation: Shared responsibilities and shared fate on Google Cloud)
- Configuring security controls within cloud environments to support compliance requirements (regionalization of data and services) (Google Documentation: Regionalization and data residency)
- Restricting compute and data for regulatory compliance (Assured Workloads, organizational policies, Access Transparency, Access Approval) (Google Documentation: Assured Workloads, Access Transparency)
- Determining the Google Cloud environment in scope for regulatory compliance
Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer (GCP) Study Guide
To start the ideal preparation for the Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer (GCP), the following details a few of the analytical steps that you should consider for developing an ideal schedule for your preparation.
- Google Cloud Free Tier– The Google Cloud Free Tier provides the candidate with free resources to study Google Cloud services. This becomes all the more enriching for a candidate if they are completely new to the platform and need to learn the basics. On the other hand, if suppose you’re an established customer and want to experiment with new solutions, the Google Cloud Free Tier has got you covered.
- Google Cloud Essentials– In this introductory-level quest, the candidate will get hands-on practice with Google Cloud’s fundamental tools and services. Google Cloud Essentials is the recommended first Quest for the Google Cloud learner. This provides the candidate with practical experience that they can apply to their first Google Cloud project.
- Additional Learning Resources – When it comes to certification exams like Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer (GCP), the more the learning resources, the better will be the outcome. So, for that, we’re providing you two Quick links for additional resources such as Google Cloud Platform Documentation and Technical Guides.
- Testprep Online Tutorials– Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer (GCP) Online Tutorial enhances your knowledge and provides a depth understanding of the exam concepts. However, these online tutorials offer in-depth information about the examination. Therefore, studying with online tutorials will enhance and strengthen your preparation.
- Try Practice Test– Practice tests play a crucial role in assuring candidates about their preparation. With numerous practice tests available online, candidates have the flexibility to choose the ones that suit them best. At Testprep training, we also provide practice tests that are highly beneficial for those preparing for the exam.
