How Google Secures Its Own Cloud

Google runs its own workloads on Google Cloud and treats that environment like any other customer, but with the advantage of building security controls into the platform itself. By using custom Organization Policies and IAM Deny rules, Google creates programmable guardrails that enforce compliance at scale, preventing misconfigurations before they happen. These policies sit on an integration layer that abstracts the underlying services, giving teams granular and coarse-grained control over who can do what.

The team starts every new workload with threat modeling, mapping use cases to specific risks and then applying controls that match the threat profile. Resource hierarchy is leveraged to apply different policies at project, folder, and organization levels, so experimental workloads get freedom while production workloads face stricter governance. As projects mature, the available technologies shrink and the controls tighten, balancing rapid iteration with a hardened production surface.

Because Google is both provider and customer, insights from internal use feed back into the product. Infrastructure-as-Code automates policy deployment and environment setup, making insecure actions hard for engineers to take. Continuous testing of Google's own services uncovers edge cases that inform new security features, turning internal challenges into improvements that benefit all customers.