Learn about the biggest regulatory compliance risk when using Google Cloud services and how to mitigate it through proper IAM role scoping and VM hardening processes.
Table of Contents
Question
Your organization operates in a highly regulated industry and uses multiple Google Cloud services. You need to identify potential risks to regulatory compliance. Which situation introduces the greatest risk?
A. The security team mandates the use of customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) for all data classified as sensitive.
B. Sensitive data is stored in a Cloud Storage bucket with the uniform bucket-level access setting enabled.
C. The audit team needs access to Cloud Audit Logs related to managed services like BigQuery.
D. Principals have broad IAM roles allowing the creation and management of Compute Engine VMs without a pre-defined hardening process.
Answer
The situation that introduces the greatest risk to regulatory compliance is:
D. Principals have broad IAM roles allowing the creation and management of Compute Engine VMs without a pre-defined hardening process.
Explanation
Granting principals broad IAM roles that allow them to create and manage Compute Engine VMs without following a well-defined security hardening process poses a major compliance risk. Here’s why:
- Overly permissive IAM roles can allow users to provision VMs in ways that violate security best practices and compliance requirements. For example, they may spin up VMs without proper network controls, logging, or vulnerability scanning in place.
- Without a standardized hardening process, each VM may be configured differently in terms of OS/software versions, security settings, encryption, etc. This inconsistency makes it very difficult to assess the overall security posture and introduces opportunities for misconfigurations that attackers could exploit.
- Sensitive data could end up on improperly secured VMs, leading to data exposure and compliance violations. Broad permissions make it harder to maintain tight control over where regulated data resides.
In contrast, the other options, while relevant for security, are less directly tied to regulatory compliance:
A) Using customer-managed encryption keys is a security best practice but doesn’t necessarily prevent compliance issues if IAM permissions are too broad.
B) Uniform bucket-level access is a good Cloud Storage setting to use, but again, its impact on compliance depends on the larger permissions/usage context.
C) Giving the audit team access to logs is important for monitoring but doesn’t actively prevent compliance risks in the same way that tightly scoped IAM roles and a robust hardening process do.
To mitigate this risk, it’s crucial to implement least privilege access, define narrow IAM roles for VM provisioning, and mandate that all VMs go through a standard security hardening process before handling any sensitive regulated data. Doing so allows the organization to proactively enforce compliance guardrails.
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.