GCP – BeyondCorp Enterprise: Introducing a safer era of computing

Security issues continue to disrupt the status quo for global enterprises. Recent incidents highlight the need to re-think our security plans and operations; attackers are getting smarter, attacks are more sophisticated, and assumptions about what is and isn’t locked down no longer hold. The challenge, however, is to enable disruptive innovation in security without disrupting security operations. 

Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Google’s comprehensive zero trust product offering, BeyondCorp Enterprise, which extends and replaces BeyondCorp Remote Access. Google is no stranger to zero trust—we’ve been on this journey for over a decade with our own implementation of BeyondCorp, a technology suite we use internally to protect Google’s applications, data, and users. BeyondCorp Enterprise brings this modern, proven technology to organizations so they can get started on their own zero trust journey. Living and breathing zero trust for this long, we know that organizations need a solution that will not only improve their security posture, but also deliver a simple experience for users and administrators.

A modern, proven, and open approach to zero trust

Because our own zero trust journey at Google has been ongoing for a decade, we realize customers can’t merely flip a switch to make zero trust a reality in their own organizations, especially given varying resources and computing environments that might look different than ours. Nonetheless, these enterprises understand the zero trust journey is an imperative. 

As a result, we’ve invested many years in bringing our customers a solution that is cost-effective and requires minimal disruption to existing deployments and business processes, using trust, reliability and scale as our primary design criteria.

The end result is, BeyondCorp Enterprise, delivering three key benefits to customers and partners:

1) A scalable, reliable zero trust platform in a secure, agentless architecture, including: 

• Non-disruptive, agentless support delivered through the Chrome Browser, which supports more than 2 billion users worldwide.

• Google’s global network with 144 network edge locations, available in more than 200 countries and territories, so that users can work reliably from anywhere.

• The entire surface area protected by our scalable DDoS protection service, proven to withstand the largest DDoS attacks recorded (2.5 TB/sec) in recent times.

• Built-in, verifiable platform security, which has been made more important with recent software supply chain attacks. 

2) Continuous and real-time end-to-end protection

• Embedded data and threat protection, newly added to Chrome, to prevent malicious or unintentional data loss and exfiltration and malware infections from the network to the browser.

• Strong phishing-resistant authentication to ensure that users are who they say they are. 

• Continuous authorization for every interaction between a user and a BeyondCorp-protected resource.  

• End-to-end security from user to app and app to app (including microsegmentation) inspired by the BeyondProd architecture.

• Automated public trust SSL certificate lifecycle management for internet-facing BeyondCorp endpoints powered by Google Trust Services. 

3) A solution that’s open and extensible, to support a wide variety of complementary solutions 

• Built on an expanding ecosystem of technology partners in our BeyondCorp Alliance which democratizes zero trust and allows customers to leverage existing investments.

• Open at the endpoint to incorporate signals from partners such as Crowdstrike and Tanium, so customers can utilize this information when building access policies.

• Extensible at the app to integrate into best-in-class services from partners such as Citrix and VMware.

In short, if cloud-native zero trust computing is the future—and we believe it is—then our solution is unmatched when it comes to providing scale, security and user experience. With BeyondCorp Enterprise, we are bringing our proven, scalable platform to customers, meeting their zero trust requirements wherever they are.

Customers are committed to zero trust

We’ve worked with customers around the world to battle-test our BeyondCorp Enterprise technology and to help them build a more secure foundation for a modern, zero-trust architecture within their organization. Vaughn Washington, VP of Engineering at Deliveroo, a global food delivery company headquartered in the UK, says, “We love that BeyondCorp Enterprise makes it so easy to bring the zero trust model to our distributed workforce. Having secure access to applications and associated data is critical for our business. With BeyondCorp Enterprise, we manage security at the app level, which removes the need for traditional VPNs and associated risks. With BeyondCorp Enterprise and Chrome Enterprise working together, we have additional visibility and controls to help us keep our data secure.”

“We want to improve the experience for our developers and continue to raise the bar on our security posture by adopting a zero trust architecture. Google’s experience with zero trust and the capabilities of BeyondCorp Enterprise made them an ideal partner for our journey,” said Tim Collyer, Director of Enterprise Information Security at Motorola Solutions, Inc.

Support from a robust ecosystem of partners

Our partners are key to our effort to further promote and democratize this technology. The BeyondCorp Alliance allows customers to leverage existing controls to make adoption easier while adding key functionality and intelligence that enables customers to make better access decisions. Check Point, Citrix, CrowdStrike, Jamf, Lookout, McAfee, Palo Alto Networks, Symantec (a division of Broadcom), Tanium and VMware are members of our Alliance who share our vision.

“As we enter a new era of security, enterprises want a seamless security model attuned to the realities of remote work, cloud applications, and mobile communications. Zero trust is that model, and critical to its efficacy is the ability to readily assess the health of endpoints. Who is accessing them? Do they contain vulnerabilities? Are they patched and compliant?” said Orion Hindawi, co-founder and CEO of Tanium. “With Google Cloud, we’re on a journey to offer today’s distributed businesses joint solutions that provide visibility and control into activities across any network to any application for both users and endpoints.”

Matthew Polly, VP WW Alliances, Channels, and Business Development at CrowdStrike said, “In today’s complex threat environment, zero trust security is fundamental for successful protection. BeyondCorp Enterprise customers will be able to seamlessly leverage the power of the CrowdStrike Falcon platform to deliver complete protection through verified access control to their business data and applications and secure their assets and users from the sophisticated tactics of cyber adversaries, including lateral movement.” 

“The rapid move to the cloud and remote work are creating dynamic work environments that promise to drive new levels of productivity and innovation. But they have also opened the door to a host of new security concerns and sparked a significant increase in cyberattacks,” said Fermin Serna, Chief Information Security Officer, Citrix. “To defend against them, enterprises must take an intelligent approach to workspace security that protects employees without getting in the way of their experience following the zero trust model. And with Citrix Workspace and BeyondCorp Enterprise, they can do just this.”

Dan Quintas, Sr. Director of Product Management at VMware also added, “Google’s commitment to security is clear and in today’s environment, device access policies are a key piece of the zero trust framework. Using Workspace ONE integrations in BeyondCorp Enterprise, customers can leverage device compliance status information to protect corporate information and ensure their users stay productive and secure.”

We also continue to collaborate with Deloitte’s industry-leading cyber practice to deliver end-to-end architecture, design, and deployment services to assist our customers’ zero-trust journeys.

“Implementing and operationalizing a zero trust architecture is critically important for organizations today,” said Deborah Golden, Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory Cyber & Strategic Risk leader and principal, Deloitte & Touche LLP. “Both Google Cloud and Deloitte are well positioned to deliver this secure transformative change for our clients and together provide a modern security approach that’s seamless to integrate into existing infrastructures.”

Take the next step

The adoption of zero trust is an imperative for security modernization, and BeyondCorp Enterprise can help organizations overcome the challenges that come with the embrace of such a disruptive innovation. To learn more about BeyondCorp Enterprise, register for our upcoming webinar on Feb 23 and be sure to check out our BeyondCorp product home page.

To learn more about the security features of Chrome Enterprise, including the new threat and data protection features available in BeyondCorp Enterprise, attend our upcoming webinar on January 28 by registering here.