GCP – Compliance Without Compromise: Introducing Assured Workloads for Government

As U.S. government agencies and the enterprises that serve them adopt cloud technologies, security and compliance requirements around data locality and personnel access are key considerations. To meet these requirements, many cloud providers have built separate environments, with standalone data centers, to run government workloads. But these “government clouds” don’t come with the technology and benefits that a modern commercial cloud provides, and often require users to operate two distinct application and operation supply chains, adding cost, complexity, and risk.

At Google Cloud, we believe that compliance shouldn’t require compromising functionality or service availability. Today, we’re introducing Assured Workloads for Government, currently in private beta, to help you serve your government workloads without the compromises of traditional “government clouds.” This service simplifies the compliance configuration process and provides seamless platform compatibility between government and commercial cloud environments. 

With Assured Workloads for Government, Google Cloud customers can quickly and easily create controlled environments where U.S. data location and personnel access controls are automatically enforced in any of our U.S. cloud regions. Assured Workloads for Government helps government customers, suppliers, and contractors meet the high security and compliance standards set forth by the Department of Defense (i.e., IL4), the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division (CJIS), and the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), while still having access to all the latest features in our portfolio.

How it works

To help you take advantage of our best-in-class infrastructure and services, while supporting your compliance needs, Assured Workloads gives you access to the following features:

• Automatic enforcement of data location: Meet U.S. government compliance requirements by choosing to store data at rest in U.S. regions.  

• Personnel access: At Google Cloud, we do not access customer data for any reasons other than in accordance with our contracts with you. With Assured Workloads, you’ll be able to limit Google support personnel access based on predefined attributes such as citizenship, a particular geographical access location, and background checks.

• Built-in security controls: Reduce the risk of accidental misconfigurations by choosing from available platform security configurations—we’ll help put the controls in place.

• Automatic enforcement of product deployment location: Restrict the deployment of new resources to specific Google Cloud regions based on Organization Policy.

• Assured Workloads Support (coming in Q4): Receive Premium Support from a U.S. Person, in a U.S. Location, 24/7, with 15-minute target SLOs for P1 cases, to help meet compliance requirements. (This requires additional support services purchase.)

Compliance with confidence

Assured Workloads for Government helps reduce the risk and toil of running compliant workloads, without sacrificing functionality, so you can focus on all the other important tasks your business deals with every day. 

We look forward to making Assured Workload generally available, with Beta features, this fall. To learn more about how Assured Workloads for Government can help your organization, click here.