Load Balancing works well for normal increases in network traffic, but what about when you’re hit by a Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, attack? You can use Cloud Armor, which integrates with Cloud Load Balancing.

Cloud Armor is a network security service, but there are many other layers of security in GCP. The most important is IAM, which stands for Identity and Access Management. Since identity is handled using an outside service, such as Cloud Identity or even Google accounts, IAM is really about access management. It lets you assign roles to users and applications. A role grants specific permissions, such as being able to create a VM instance.

Another important security area is encryption. GCP handles this very well because everything is encrypted by default. However, many organizations need to manage the encryption keys that are used to encrypt their data, especially to comply with certain security standards. Google provides Cloud Key Management to allow your organization to centrally manage your encryption keys.

A similar service is Secret Manager, which is a central place to store your API keys, passwords, certificates, and other secrets.

Finally, the Data Loss Prevention service helps you protect sensitive data. For example, if your user records contain credit card numbers, you could configure DLP to remove them before responding to a database query.

And that’s it for this brief overview of GCP’s security and access management services.