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Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer: How to Securely Grant Teams Flexibility to Modify Google Cloud Organization Policies?

Learn the best practices for granting teams the necessary permissions to modify Google Cloud organization policies while maintaining security and minimizing complexity. Discover how to use organization-level tags and IAM conditions to restrict access.

Table of Contents

Question

You are managing a Google Cloud environment that is organized into folders that represent different teams. These teams need the flexibility to modify organization policies relevant to their work. You want to grant the teams the necessary permissions while upholding Google-recommended security practices and minimizing administrative complexity. What should you do?

A. Create a custom IAM role with the organization policy administrator permission and grant the permission to each team’s folder. Limit policy modifications based on folder names within the custom role’s definition.
B. Assign the organization policy administrator role to a central service account and provide teams with the credentials to use the service account when needed.
C. Create an organization-level tag. Attach the tag to relevant folders. Use an IAM condition to restrict the organization policy administrator role to resources with that tag.
D. Grant each team the organization policy administrator role at the organization level.

Answer

C. Create an organization-level tag. Attach the tag to relevant folders. Use an IAM condition to restrict the organization policy administrator role to resources with that tag.

Explanation

This approach follows Google-recommended security best practices by granting the least privilege necessary and minimizing administrative complexity. Here’s why:

  1. Creating an organization-level tag allows you to label folders that require policy modification permissions. This provides flexibility and scalability as your organization grows.
  2. Attaching the tag to relevant folders ensures that only the folders representing teams that need to modify policies are tagged, limiting the scope of the permission.
  3. Using an IAM condition to restrict the organization policy administrator role to resources with the specific tag ensures that the permission is only granted where needed. This granular access control follows the principle of least privilege.
  4. By using tags and IAM conditions, you avoid creating custom IAM roles or managing multiple service accounts, which reduces administrative complexity and potential security risks.

Options A and D are not recommended because they either involve creating custom IAM roles or granting the organization policy administrator role at the organization level, which can lead to excessive permissions and increased complexity.

Option B is not ideal as it involves sharing service account credentials, which is a security risk and makes it difficult to audit who performed what actions.

In summary, using organization-level tags and IAM conditions to restrict the organization policy administrator role to specific folders is the most secure and manageable approach to grant teams the necessary flexibility while maintaining a strong security posture.

Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer certification exam assessment practice question and answer (Q&A) dump including multiple choice questions (MCQ) and objective type questions, with detail explanation and reference available free, helpful to pass the Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer exam and earn Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer certification.