The GCP Security Engineer certification was created by Google Cloud to address the high-stakes challenge of cloud security and the need for cloud security specialists. However, the GCP Security Engineer GCP is a professional who is responsible for assisting enterprises in the planning and deployment of highly secure infrastructure on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). GCP has developed particular technologies for insuring safety and identification across projects, and security is a defining characteristic of the GCP services. By installing VPNs and VPCs, the applicant should get expertise with network security and learn what tools are available for security fulmination and data loss safeguards. Google Cloud certificates demonstrate a candidate’s knowledge and aptitude to persuade organizations to use Google Cloud technologies.Why choose Google Cloud Platform?
- GCP is the most significant global demand.
- Also, the high confirmation rate of Google cloud services by corporations.
- In addition, the absence of cloud expertise is recognised as the #1 difficulty with cloud adoption by 25% of organisations. There’s definitely a shortage of certified Google cloud professionals available today.
- Moreover, Connecting Google Cloud Platform certifications with additional certifications to develop skill sets and improve salaries even more.
Benefits of being a Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer
First of all, let us talk about some advantages of being a GCP Security Engineer certification.
- The applicant will get the chance to allocate solution components, comprising infrastructure elements such as networks, systems and applications services.
- Also, they get real-world knowledge through plenty of hands-on labs projects. Needless to say, a professional certified GCP Security Engineer becomes job-ready and gets a pleasing salary package.
- Further, The GCP Security Engineer has an exceptional understanding of GCP and cloud architecture. Thus, they ensure to project, arrange, develop, and manage the scalable, dynamic, highly accessible solutions to the objectives of the business.
GCP Security Engineer: Briefing
- On Google Cloud Platform, a GCP Security Engineer enables enterprises to develop, maintain, and operate a secure and reliable infrastructure. Similarly, the applicant designs, builds, and manages a reliable infrastructure using Google security technologies, based on a thorough grasp of security best practises and industry security duties.
- Secondly, the GCP Security Engineer Professional should be skilled in all perspectives of Cloud Security comprising access management and managing identity, establishing organizational arrangement and policies, applying Google technologies to implement data protection, debugging network security defences, accumulating and analyzing GCP logs, running incident responses, and a knowledge of regulatory concerns.
- Furthermore, the performance of a professional GCP Security Engineer also includes the administration of incident acknowledgements and a more widespread understanding of supervisory precedents.
Exam Basic Details:
The followings are the basic details regarding the GCP Security Engineer exam:
- The candidate will be given 2 hours i.e. 120 minutes for completing the exam.
- The Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer Exam Questions will be in multiple-choice and multiple-response format.
- The exam is available in the language English.
Prerequisite:
- Experience with GCP at the level of GCP Certified Associate Cloud Engineer
- Minimum of three years of business practice including at least one year of designing and managing solutions utilising GCP.
- Candidates can serve the GCP Security Engineer exam at the test centres designated by Google all across the world.
Target Audience for the GCP Security Engineer Certification:
One of the greatest things before commencing GCP Security Engineer certification preparation is identifying if this certification is designed for you or not. Further, the ideal target audience for the Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer Certification covers the following candidates:
- Firstly, Cloud information security analysts.
- Secondly, Cloud information security architects.
- Then, Cloud information security engineers.
- Also, Cybersecurity or Information Security specialists.
- Further, Cloud infrastructure architects.
- Moreover, Cloud application developers.
- In addition, Google and partner field personnel working with customers in the roles mentioned above.
Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer Course Outline
The exam domains are the principal theme of each productive GCP security engineer study guide.
A look at the exam objectives could encourage the candidates to anticipate the character of questions in the certification exam.
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
The GCP Security Engineer exam would test the capabilities of the candidates in the arrangement of network security standards besides the acquisition and examination of GCP logs.
Preparatory Guide for GCP Security Engineer
The GCP Security Engineer utilises in-depth knowledge and skills of best practices for safety and a particular impression of industry security demands. Applicants should concentrate on the exam specifications as their first course of effort to prepare for the certification. Each applicant should understand the GCP Security Engineer certification to pass the exam in the very first attempt. The convenience of insights from the knowledge of different subject matter specialists and certified experts make the preparation easier. Furthermore, the presumption of many aspiring applicants being strong in GCP certification exams by following the steps adds credibility.
So, here are the established and sustained steps that can help a candidate improve the preparations for achieving progress. Lets understand with the Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer Study Guide:
1. Review the Objectives
Applicants could have more reliable GCP Security Engineer certification preparation with a comprehensive overview of exam domains or objectives.
The exam evaluates the candidate’s ability to:
- Customizing admittance within a cloud solution environment.
- Configuring the network security.
- Ensuring data protection.
- Managing processes within a cloud solution environment.
- Ensuring compliance.
2. Download the Study Guide!
The study guide is the blueprint of the exam, be it GCP Security Engineer certification which the candidate can easily find on the official site of Google. The blueprint includes all relevant information such as course outline, basic exam details. So that the candidate doesn’t have any queries in their mind.
3. Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer Training
The training program by GCP gives members a broad knowledge of security controls and techniques on the GCP. Through demonstrations, lectures, and hands-on labs, members explore and expand the components of a strong GCP solution. Participants also receive mitigation procedures for attacks at various points in a GCP-based infrastructure, comprising Distributed Denial-of-Service assaults, malware attacks, and threats including content classification and use.
Following domains is the course outline of the GCP Security Engineer training program:
Module 1: Foundations of GCP Security
- Google Cloud’s approach to security
- The shared security responsibility model
- Access Transparency
- Threats mitigated by Google and by GCP
Module 2: Cloud Identity
- Cloud Identity
- Choosing between Google authentication and SAML-based SSO
- Syncing with Microsoft Active Directory
- GCP best practices
Module 3: Identity and Access Management
- GCP Resource Manager: projects, folders, and organizations
- Also, GCP IAM policies, including organization policies
- Further, GCP IAM best practices
Module 4: Configure Google Virtual Cloud for Isolation and Security
- Configuring VPC firewalls
- Also, Private Google API access
- Further, SSL proxy use
- Then, Load balancing and SSL policies
- Moreover, Best security practices for VPNs
- In addition, Security considerations for interconnecting and peering options
- Lastly, Available security products from partners
Module 5: Monitoring, Logging, Auditing, and Scanning
- Stackdriver monitoring and logging
- Cloud audit logging
- VPC flow logs
- Deploying and Using Forseti
Module 6: Securing Compute Engine: techniques and best practices
- Compute Engine service accounts, default and customer-defined
- API scopes for VMs
- Managing SSH keys for Linux VMs
- IAM roles for VMs
- Managing RDP logins for Windows VMs
- Encoding M images with customer-managed encryption keys
- Organization policy controls: public IP address, trusted images, disabling serial port
- Finding and remediating public access to VMs
- Encrypting VM disks with customer-supplied encryption keys
Module 7: Securing cloud data: techniques and best practices
- Cloud Storage and IAM permissions
- Auditing cloud data, comprising finding and remediating publicly accessible data
- To Signed Cloud Storage URLs
- Signed policy documents
- Also, Best practices, including deleting archived versions of objects after key rotation
- Further, BigQuery authorized views
- Moreover, BigQuery IAM roles
- In addition, Best practices, including preferring IAM permissions over ACLs
Module 8: Protecting against Distributed Denial of Service Attacks
- How DDoS attacks work
- Types of complementary partner products
- Mitigations: Cloud CDN, GCLB, VPC ingress, autoscaling and egress firewalls, Cloud Armor
Module 9: Application Security: techniques and best practices
- Types of application security vulnerabilities
- Identity Aware Proxy
- Cloud Security Scanner
- Threat: Identity and OAuth phishing
- DoS protection in App Engine and Cloud Functions
Module 10: Content-related vulnerabilities: techniques and best practices
- Threat: Ransomware
- And, Threats: Data misuse, privacy violations, sensitive/restricted/unacceptable content
- Mitigations: Backups, IAM, Data Loss Prevention API
- Also, Mitigations: Classifying content using Cloud ML APIs; scanning and redacting data using Data Loss Prevention API
4. Practise Tests
The Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer Practice Exam will familiarize the candidate with the various types of questions that the candidate may encounter on the certification exam. Practise test is formed to test technical knowledge and skills correlated to the job role. Hands-on experience is the most suitable preparation for the exam. Also, the practise tests help the candidate to determine their readiness or if they need more preparation and thus they make strategies accordingly. The candidate can go for as many free practise tests which are easily available all over the internet.
5. Strategize your way!
Once the candidate is done with the above-mentioned step then they should make a strategy on how they are going to prepare for the exam. Further, strategizing will make things for the candidate and then they will easily complete their preparation on time.
Closing Thoughts
All the steps which are mentioned above of the preparation guide will take the candidate towards success in the GCP Security Engineer exam. Furthermore, the normal GCP Security Engineer salary assessment is one of the obvious reasons for stimulating interest in GCP Security Engineer certification. So, get ready and become a GCP Security Engineer and be responsible for assisting organizations in the configuration and implementation of highly-secure foundation on Google Cloud Platform. CLICK HERE FOR MORE PRACTISE TEST!
A great career is just a certification away. So, practice and validate your skills to become a GCP Professional Security Engineer!
