Are you interested in becoming a Google Cloud Professional Security Engineer? If so, you’ve come to the right place. With the growing demand for cloud security professionals, earning this certification can open up a world of opportunities for you. However, preparing for the exam can be challenging without the right resources. That’s why we’re excited to introduce you to our comprehensive certification test prep guide for Google Cloud’s Professional Security Engineer. Our guide covers all the essential topics you need to know, including security policy, infrastructure security, data protection, and much more. With our guide, you’ll have access to practice exams, detailed explanations, and real-world scenarios to help you prepare for the exam with confidence. So, whether you’re a seasoned IT professional or just starting in the field, our guide will help you ace the exam and take your career to the next level.

A Cloud Security Engineer enables organizations to design and implement secure workloads and infrastructure on Google Cloud. Through an understanding of security best practices and industry security requirements, this individual designs, develops, and manages a secure infrastructure by leveraging Google security technologies. The Cloud Security Engineer should be proficient in all aspects of cloud Security including identity and access management, defining organizational structure and policies, using Google technologies to provide data protection, configuring network security defenses, collecting and analyzing Google Cloud logs, managing incident responses, and demonstrating an understanding of the application of dynamic regulatory considerations.

–Google

The exam is 2 hours long and costs $200.

Exam Content & Outline – What Will You Be Tested On?

There are FIVE main crucial capabilities that the exam will test you on:

1. Configuring access within a cloud solution environment
2. Configuring network security
3. Ensuring data protection
4. Managing operations in a cloud solution environment
5. Ensuring compliance

Let’s look at each of these in more detail and find out what exactly to study in order to be certified as a Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer.

Configuring Access Within A Cloud Solution Environment

For this section, you will need to know how to give access to humans and bots with the appropriate level of permissions. GCP offers a ton of sophisticated tools for you to use to achieve this goal, and it’s your responsibility as a cloud security engineer to know how to leverage these technologies to your advantage.

1. Configuring Cloud Identity
   • Managing Cloud Identity
   • Configuring Google Cloud Directory Sync
   • Managing super administrator account
   • Automating user lifecycle management process
   • Administering user accounts and groups programmatically
2. Managing service accounts
   • Protecting and auditing service accounts and keys
   • Automating the rotation of user-managed service account keys
   • Identifying scenarios requiring service accounts
   • Creating, authorizing, and securing service accounts
   • Securely managing API access management
   • Managing and creating short-lived credentials
3. Managing authentication
   • Creating a password policy for user accounts
   • Establishing SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language)
   • Configuring and enforcing two-factor authentication
4. Managing and implementing authorization controls
   • Managing privileged roles and separation of duties
   • Managing IAM permissions with basic, predefined, and custom roles
   • Granting permissions to different types of identities
   • Understanding difference between Cloud Storage IAM and ACLs
   • Designing identity roles at the organization, folder, project, and resource level
   • Configuring Access Context Manager
5. Defining resource hierarchy
   • Creating and managing organizations
   • Designing resource policies for organizations, folders, projects, and resources
   • Managing organization constraints
   • Using resource hierarchy for access control and permissions inheritance
   • Designing and managing trust and security boundaries within Google Cloud projects

Configuring Network Security

Networks connect the people, the machines, and everything in-between – data, communication, secrets, money. There are tools out there that hackers can use to illegally sneak into your network without your permission and do some nasty things to it. Fortunately, GCP offers you Cloud Armor to protect you against attacks, as well as Cloud DNS, NAT, private connectivity, IAP, and more to seriously harden your network infrastructure from being taken over.

1. Designing network security
   • Configuring network perimeter controls (firewall rules, IAP: Identity-Aware Proxy)
   • Configuring load balancing (global, network, HTTPS, SSL proxy, TCP proxy)
   • Identifying DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions)
   • Identifying differences between private vs. public addressing
   • Configuring web application firewall (Cloud Armor)
   • Configuring Cloud DNS
2. Configuring network segmentation
   • Configuring security properties of a VPC network, VPC peering, Shared VPC, and firewall rules
   • Configuring network isolation and data encapsulation for N-tier application design
   • Configuring app-to-app security policy
3. Establishing private connectivity
   • Designing and configuring private RFC1918 connectivity between VPC networks and Google Cloud projects (Shared VPC, VPC peering)
   • Designing and configuring private RFC1918 connectivity between data centers and VPC network (IPSec and Cloud Interconnect)
   • Establishing private connectivity between VPC and Google APIs (Private Google Access, Private Google Access for on-premises hosts, Private Service Connect)
   • Configuring Cloud NAT

Ensuring Data Protection

Without any data to move around, having the most sophisticated network on the planet would be worth as much as a grain of rice. Data is the gold of the 21st century. Data can range from an image of an elephant to an array of user passwords for C-level executives. Anybody can access these data. As the security engineer, you are responsible that the data does not fall into the wrong hands, and if it does, it would be nearly impossible to crack it. This section will test you on that and on concepts, like encryption and secret keys.

1. Protecting sensitive data
   • Inspecting and redacting personally identifiable information (PII)
   • Configuring pseudonymization
   • Configuring format-preserving substitution
   • Restricting access to BigQuery datasets
   • Configuring VPC Service Controls
   • Securing secrets with Secret Manager
   • Protecting and managing compute instance metadata
2. Managing encryption at rest
   • Understanding use cases for Google default encryption, CMEK, CSEK, EKM, and Cloud HSM
   • Creating and managing encryption keys for CMEK, CSEK, EKM
   • Applying Google’s encryption approach to use cases
   • Configuring object lifecycle policies for Cloud Storage
   • Enabling confidential computing

Managing Operations In A Cloud Solution Environment

This section tests you on your ability to set up a sustainable system to enforce security policies on resources residing in GCP using automation. In addition, as with all operational tasks, you are required to understand how to design and apply different methods of collecting, analyzing, and handling detailed information of your cloud technologies to detect and prevent threats.

1. Building and deploying secure infrastructure and applications
   • Automating security scanning for CVEs through a CI/CD pipeline
   • Automating virtual machine image creation, hardening, and maintenance
   • Automating container image creation, verification, hardening, maintenance, and patch management
2. Configuring logging, monitoring, and detection
   • Configuring and analyzing network logs (firewall rule logs, VPC flow logs, packet mirroring)
   • Designing an effective logging strategy
   • Logging, monitoring, responding to, and remediating security incidents
   • Exporting logs to external security systems
   • Configuring and analyzing Google Cloud audit logs and data access logs
   • Configuring log exports (log sinks, aggregated sinks, logs router)
   • Configuring and monitoring Security Command Center
     • Security Health Analytics, Event Threat Detection, Container Threat Detection, Web Security Scanner)

Ensuring Compliance

Various governments and laws exist that you must follow; this mostly pertains to the way data is handled. Be sure to check your local, regional, or national regulations if you work in an environment that deal with highly sensitive data, such as finance and healthcare.

1. Determining regulatory requirements for the cloud
   • Determining concerns relative to compute, data, and network
   • Evaluating security shared responsibility model
   • Configuring security controls within cloud environments
   • Limiting compute and data for regulatory compliance
   • Determining the Google Cloud environment in scope for regulatory compliance

Recommended Study Materials

1. Books
   • Cloud Security Handbook: Find out how to effectively secure cloud environments using AWS, Azure, and GCP
   • Securing DevOps: Security in the Cloud
   • Cloud Auditing Best Practices: Perform Security and IT Audits across AWS, Azure, and GCP by building effective cloud auditing plans