How Defender for Cloud Apps helps protect your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environment

Note

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is now part of Microsoft 365 Defender, which correlates signals from across the Microsoft Defender suite and provides incident-level detection, investigation, and powerful response capabilities. For more information, see Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps in Microsoft 365 Defender.

Google Cloud Platform is an IaaS provider that enables your organization to host and manage their entire workloads in the cloud. Along with the benefits of leveraging infrastructure in the cloud, your organization's most critical assets may be exposed to threats. Exposed assets include storage instances with potentially sensitive information, compute resources that operate some of your most critical applications, ports, and virtual private networks that enable access to your organization.

Connecting GCP to Defender for Cloud Apps helps you secure your assets and detect potential threats by monitoring administrative and sign-in activities, notifying on possible brute force attacks, malicious use of a privileged user account, and unusual deletions of VMs.

Main threats

• Abuse of cloud resources
• Compromised accounts and insider threats
• Data leakage
• Resource misconfiguration and insufficient access control

How Defender for Cloud Apps helps to protect your environment

• Detect cloud threats, compromised accounts, and malicious insiders
• Use the audit trail of activities for forensic investigations

Control GCP with built-in policies and policy templates

You can use the following built-in policy templates to detect and notify you about potential threats:

Type	Name
Built-in anomaly detection policy	Activity from anonymous IP addresses Activity from infrequent country Activity from suspicious IP addresses Impossible travel Activity performed by terminated user (requires Azure Active Directory as IdP) Multiple failed login attempts Unusual administrative activities Multiple delete VM activities Unusual multiple VM creation activities (preview)
Activity policy template	Changes to compute engine resources Changes to StackDriver configuration Changes to storage resources Changes to Virtual Private Network Logon from a risky IP address

For more information about creating policies, see Create a policy.

Automate governance controls

In addition to monitoring for potential threats, you can apply and automate the following GCP governance actions to remediate detected threats:

Type	Action
User governance	- Require user to reset password to Google (requires connected linked Google Workspace instance) - Suspend user (requires connected linked Google Workspace instance) - Notify user on alert (via Azure AD) - Require user to sign in again (via Azure AD) - Suspend user (via Azure AD)

For more information about remediating threats from apps, see Governing connected apps.

Protect GCP in real time

Review our best practices for securing and collaborating with external users and blocking and protecting the download of sensitive data to unmanaged or risky devices.

Next steps

How to connect GCP to Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps