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Google Cloud named a leader in latest Forrester Research Public Cloud Platform Native Security Wave

May 23, 2018
Mike Aiello

Director of Product Management, Cloud Security and Privacy

Today, we are happy to announce that Forrester Research has named Google Cloud as one of just two leaders in The Forrester WaveTM: Public Cloud Platform Native Security (PCPNS), Q2 2018 report, and rated Google Cloud highest in strategy. The report evaluates the native security capabilities and features of public cloud providers, such as encryption, identity and access management (IAM) and workload security.

The report finds that most security and risk professionals (S&R) now believe that “native security capabilities of large public cloud platforms actually offer more affordable and superior security than what S&R teams could deliver themselves if the workloads remained on-premises.”

The report particularly highlights that “Google has been continuing to invest in PCPNS. The platform’s security configuration policies are very granular in the admin console as well as in APIs. The platform has a large number of security certifications, broad partner ecosystem, offers deep native support for guest operating systems and Kubernetes containers, and supports auto-scaling (GPUs can be added to instances).”

In this wave, Forrester evaluated seven public cloud platforms against 37 criteria, looking at current offerings, strategy and market presence. Of the seven vendors, Google Cloud scored highest on strategy, and received the highest score possible in its strategic plans in physical security, certifications and attestations, hypervisor security, guest OS workload security, network security, and machine learning criteria.

Further, Forrester cited Google Cloud’s security roadmap. As part of our roadmap, Google Cloud continues to redefine what’s possible in the cloud with unique security capabilities like Access Transparency, Istio, Identity-Aware Proxy, VPC Service Controls, and Asylo.

The vendor plans: to 1) provide ongoing security improvements to the admin console using device trust, location, etc., 2) implement hardware-backed encryption key management, and 3) improve visibility into the platform by launching a unified risk dashboard.

At Google, we have worked for over a decade to build a secure, scalable and flexible cloud foundation. Our belief is that if you put security first, everything else will follow. Security continues to be top of mind—from our custom hardware like our Titan chip, to data encryption both at rest and in transit by default. On this strong foundation, we offer enterprises a rich set of controls and capabilities to meet their security and compliance requirements.

You can download the full Forrester Public Cloud Platform Native Security Wave Q2 2018 report here (requires an email address). To learn more about GCP, visit our website, and sign up for a free trial.

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