Google Cloud Platform Blog
Product updates, customer stories, and tips and tricks on Google Cloud Platform
IAM best practice guides available now
Tuesday, March 29, 2016
Google Cloud Identity & Access Managemen
t (IAM) service gives you additional capabilities to secure access to your
Google Cloud Platform
resources. To assist you when designing your IAM strategy, we've created a set of best practice guides.
The best practices guides include:
Using IAM Securely
Designing Resource Hierarchies
Understanding Service Accounts
The “
Using IAM Securely
” guide will help you to implement IAM controls securely by providing a checklist of best practices for the most common areas of concern when using IAM. It categorizes best practices into four sections:
Least privilege - A set of checks that assist you in restricting your users or applications to not do more than they're supposed to.
Managing Service Accounts and Service Account keys - Provides pointers to help you manage both securely.
Auditing - This covers practices that include reminding you to use
Audit logs
and
cloud logging roles
Policy Management - Some checks to ensure that you're implementing and managing your policies appropriately.
Cloud Platform resources are organized hierarchically and IAM policies can propagate down the structure. You're able to set IAM policies at the following levels of the resource hierarchy:
Organization level
. The Organization resource represents your company. IAM roles granted at this level are inherited by all resources under the organization.
Project level
. Projects represent a trust boundary within your company. Services within the same project have a default level of trust. For example, App Engine instances can access Cloud storage buckets within the same project. IAM roles granted at the project level are inherited by resources within that project.
Resource level
. In addition to the existing
Google Cloud Storage
and
Google BigQuery
ACL systems, additional resources such as
Google Genomics
Datasets and
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
topics support resource-level roles so that you can grant certain users permission to a single resource.
The diagram below illustrates an example of a Cloud Platform resource hierarchy:
The “
Designing Resource Hierarchies
” guide provides examples of what this means in practice and has a handy checklist to double-check that you're following best practice.
A Service Account is a special type of Google account that belongs to your application or a virtual machine (VM), instead of to an individual end user. The “
Understanding Service Accounts
” guide provides answers to the most common questions, like:
What resources can the service account access?
What permissions does it need?
Where will the code assuming the identity of the service account be running: on Google Cloud Platform or on-premises?
This guide discusses what the implications are of making certain decisions so that you have enough information to use Service Accounts safely and efficiently.
We’ll be producing more IAM best practice guides and are keen to hear from customers using IAM or wanting to use IAM on what additional content would be helpful. We’re also keen to hear if there are curated roles we haven’t thought of. We want Cloud Platform to be the most secure and the easiest cloud to use so your feedback is important to us and helps us shape our approach. Please share your feedback with us at:
GCP-iam-feedback@google.com
-
Posted by Grace Mollison, Solutions Architect
Free Trial
GCP Blogs
Big Data & Machine Learning
Kubernetes
GCP Japan Blog
Popular Posts
Introducing Cloud Spanner: a global database service for mission-critical applications
New undersea cable expands capacity for Google APAC customers and users
Announcing GPUs for Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Machine Learning family grows with new API, editions and pricing
Bringing Pokémon GO to life on Google Cloud
Labels
Announcements
74
Big Data & Machine Learning
112
Compute
188
Containers & Kubernetes
44
CRE
15
Customers
92
Developer Tools & Insights
105
Events
38
Infrastructure
33
Management Tools
47
Networking
25
Open Source
112
Partners
75
Pricing
24
Security & Identity
41
Solutions
17
Stackdriver
19
Storage & Databases
127
Weekly Roundups
16
Feed
Subscribe by email
Certified Professional
Cloud Architect
Demonstrate your proficiency to design, build and manage solutions on Google Cloud Platform.
Learn More
Technical questions? Check us out on
Stack Overflow
.
Subscribe to
our monthly newsletter
.
Google
on
Follow @googlecloud
Follow
Follow
Follow