Google Cloud Beefs Up Security With Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet

Google Cloud teamed up with a slew of vendors including Palo Alto Networks, McAfee, Fortinet, Qualys, and ForgeRock as part of its ongoing effort to beef up its security and attract more enterprise customers to its cloud platform and services. Google Cloud teamed up with a slew of vendors including Palo Alto Networks, McAfee, Fortinet, Qualys, and ForgeRock as part of its ongoing effort to beef up its security and attract more enterprise customers to its cloud platform and services. “As is true in other domains, cloud security programs should be based on a defense-in-depth approach,” said Doug Cahill, a senior analyst at ESG and director of the firm’s cybersecurity practice. “In that context these partnership announcements are important as they build out security stack around Google Cloud comprised of both native and third-party controls.” Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud pledged to jointly develop a new multi-cloud security framework for Anthos, which is Google Cloud’s hybrid platform, and multi-cloud Kubernetes deployments. The framework will use Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma Cloud security platform and its VM-Series virtual firewalls. It aims to help Google Cloud customers deploy a common compliance and runtime security posture across all of their workloads, the partners said. In addition to the new security framework, Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud announced a new threat intelligence integration. This will combine Google Cloud’s Event Threat Detection product with Palo Alto Networks AutoFocus threat intelligence service. Integrating signals based on Google’s own internal sources with additional visibility from Palo Alto Networks footprint of network, endpoint, and cloud intelligence sources will help joint customers proactively identify and stop threats, according to the vendors. Both the new security framework and threat intelligence integration will be available beginning in the first half of 2020. Meanwhile, a new partnership with McAfee will integrate that vendor’s endpoint security technology for Linux and Windows workloads, as well as its Mvision Cloud platform for container security, on Google Cloud infrastructure. McAfee’s workload security technology uses machine learning and cloud analytics to help protect against file-based, fileless, and script-based threats at scale for workloads deployed on Google Cloud. Its new container security product, which launched last week, extends data security, threat prevention, governance, and compliance capabilities of the Mvision Cloud platform to provide additional security for container-based workloads on Google Cloud. In another extended integration with Google Cloud, Fortinet today announced a reference architecture for customers to connect distributed branches to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with Fortinet’s SD-WAN. In addition to a host of Fortinet products (including its next-generation firewall and network manager product) that already support GCP, Fortinet made its web application firewall (WAF) available in the Google Cloud Marketplace. Using the new Google Cloud reference architecture, customers can design and build cloud on-ramps for GCP, providing secure, high-speed connectivity across Google Anthos deployments on-premise and in GCP, as well as SSL inspection for office connectivity through Fortinet’s SD-WAN product. In addition to the WAF integration, Fortinet said its FortiCWP product will soon integrate with GCP’s Cloud Security Command Center to provide additional workload protection and visibility. Using Fortinet’s FortiGuard-based threat intelligence, FortiCWP will conduct deep analysis of activities and data in GCP to enable customer to detect threats or anomalies. The vendor says this will allow IT teams to respond with instant remediation. Google Cloud Security Command Center integration with FortiCWP will be available in early 2020. Fortinet made similar integrations over the past several weeks with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Qualys partnered with Google Cloud to make its cloud-based security and compliance products available via the Google Cloud Marketplace. This new integration includes the Qualys Cloud Agent — a lightweight scanner that the vendor says enables two-second global visibility. With Qualys on Google Cloud, vulnerability findings are automatically available in the GCP Security Command Center, thus enabling self-service capabilities for cloud administrators by giving them direct visibility into the security posture of the cloud assets they manage. These same findings are also available centrally in the Qualys Cloud Platform, which allows security teams to track and report across the entire enterprise, including multiple cloud accounts, various providers, as well as on-premises assets and user endpoints. And finally, ForgeRock joined the Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program and said it’s the first Premier-level identity management vendor in the program. Last month ForgeRock launched is Identity Cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS), built on GCP, which also includes a software-as-a-service (SaaS) option for embedding modern identity capabilities into apps. ForgeRock also demonstrated its technology, deploying 100-plus million users on its platform with GCP.