GCP – Project Shield expands free DDoS protection to even more organizations and nonprofits

Project Shield has helped news, human rights, and elections-related organizations defend against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks since 2013 as part of Google’s commitment to keep online content universally accessible. The solution has helped keep election resources online, supported news reporting during pivotal geopolitical events, and helped governments during times of urgency.

We are pleased to announce that Project Shield is expanding our eligibility criteria to support and protect organizations representing marginalized groups and non-profit organizations supporting the arts and sciences. These types of organizations are often subject to attacks and censorship attempts, and DDoS represents a common component of these attacks. Now with Project Shield, these newly eligible organizations can protect their websites against DDoS attacks free of charge. 

The same technologies that protect Google

Project Shield is built on top of Google Cloud Networking and our global front-end solution. Operated by Google Cloud in partnership with Jigsaw, it integrates the global front-end with Google Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud CDN, and Cloud Armor. This solution and the underlying products work together to mitigate attacks, cache your content, and serve it from multiple points on Google’s edge network. 

This protection is built on the same infrastructure and maintained by the same teams that protect Google’s core services, including Search, Maps, and Gmail.

Each of the solutions that comprise Project Shield plays an important role in protecting our customers. Google Cloud Load Balancing serves your traffic from Google’s global network, and can increase your performance while allowing scalable global traffic controls. Doing so can help users all over the world connect to your site more quickly and reliably. Once your traffic is being served by a Cloud Load Balancer, Project Shield can engage additional defenses, such as Cloud Armor and Cloud CDN.

Cloud Armor mitigates attack traffic at the edge of Google’s infrastructure, so your website stays safe and online, regardless of the backend location. Adaptive Protection uses machine learning to analyze your traffic to find and mitigate attacks, using the same defenses that protect our largest enterprise customers. 

Project Shield employs tailored rate limits that are custom-tuned to your site, enhancing protection without blocking real users or search engines visiting your site. These defenses are enabled proactively and kick in quickly when malicious traffic is detected, often banning attackers within the first few seconds.

Cloud CDN provides caching, giving your backend a break by allowing traffic to resolve at Google’s network edge. This can help defend against broad, shallow DDoS attacks, where millions of attackers each send what looks like a normal amount of traffic. Cacheable content from your website can reach users faster, and lower the burden on your hosting servers. During legitimate surges, such as your site going viral, or on a big event like election day, caching can dramatically reduce the load on your servers and help keep your website online.

These services are directly available to any organization through the Google Cloud console, and can be set up and customized to protect any type of workload, not just those eligible for Project Shield. Organizations that are not eligible for Project Shield can still take advantage of the same Cloud Networking technologies that power Project Shield with this guide.  

Get protected today

DDoS is a looming threat, and capable of taking down your service, with no special access or compromise required.  We encourage organizations from any of the eligible categories for Project Shield to sign up at g.co/shield. Application review usually takes a few hours (but can potentially stretch to a few business days). Approved organizations can configure Project Shield protection for their sites in just a few minutes.

Other organizations can learn more about getting started with enterprise Google Cloud Networking services, and can get set up with a load balancer and protection today.