Google Cloud announces new solutions and partner updates

17 Dec 2019

Image: © Andrei/Stock.adobe.com

Google Cloud has made a number of announcements relating to security and partnerships that are of particular interest to the platform’s enterprise customers.

As we near the end of the year, plenty of businesses have some loose ends to tie up. For Google Cloud, it appears that those loose ends include more than a dozen announcements relating to the platform’s solutions and partners.

On Monday (16 December), Google Cloud wrote: “Security is of top mind for every organisation, at every stage of your cloud journey, whether you’re just beginning to migrate a few applications or running entire stacks of mission-critical workloads in the cloud.

“We understand that many customers have dedicated tools and strategic relationships with the industry’s leading security vendors. We want to meet you where you are, allowing you to preserve your investments, as well as benefit from functionality you can’t get on other clouds.”

Growing partnerships

Google said that is why it’s working closely with partners in the security industry, announcing a number of new solutions and security partner integrations in a bid to advance Google Cloud’s capabilities.

This includes a new solution to help customers manage the deployment of agent-based endpoint security and vulnerability management solutions, automatically and at scale, with McAfee, Palo Alto Networks and Qualys on Google Cloud.

By growing its strategic partnership with Palo Alto Networks, Google Cloud will be able to develop new solutions for Anthos and threat detection.

Elsewhere, Google Cloud will integrate McAfee’s MVision Cloud solution for data security, threat prevention, governance and compliance capabilities for container workloads with Google Cloud, as well as its endpoint security solution for Linux and Windows-based workloads.

Citrix Workspace, Exabeam and ForgeRock

Another announcement the company made was relating to the availability of Citrix Workspace on Google Cloud. There will now be integration with G Suite that provides a single sign-on experience, multi-factor authentication, enhanced security policies and end-to-end visibility and analytics, among other features.

Google Cloud also announced that Exabeam, a leading security information and event management (SIEM) vendor, will expand its SaaS cloud security management platform on Google Cloud, helping customers bring the scale and speed of the cloud to their existing SIEM platform.

A strategic partnership with ForgeRock was also formed, bringing its digital identity platform to Google Cloud. This platform helps customers build and maintain cloud-ready architecture to automate multi-cloud deployments.

The company will also expand its work with Fortinet to provide a new reference architecture for customers to connect facilities to Google Cloud with secure SD-WAN solutions, to make its FortiWeb cloud WAF-as-a-service available on Google Cloud and to integrate its FortiCWP service with Google Cloud Security Command Center.

Security and data protection

Additionally, there’s new support from Semperis and Stealthbits to enable customers to manage, audit and protect their Microsoft Active Directory-dependent apps and workloads running on Google Cloud from service outages, data breaches and cyberattacks.

There’s also a new integration between Tanium’s endpoint security telemetry and Chronicle’s Backstory platform to provide full visibility into endpoint events across an enterprise.

Google Cloud announced that it would be expanding its work with leading systems integrators and managed services providers, such as Deloitte, IBM Security, Wipro, Arctic Wolf, Comm-IT, Cyderes and Optiv.

The company added: “In addition, we are excited to recognise several partners who partnered with Google Cloud to build specialised security solutions and demonstrated high levels of success in meeting customer needs.

“This first set of partners includes Aqua, Cavarin, Check Point Software Technologies, Fortinet, McAfee, Palo Alto Networks and Qualys.”

The company ended the announcement by saying that these partnerships build on Google Cloud’s commitment to providing customers with high levels of security and data protection.

Kelly Earley was a journalist with Silicon Republic

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