Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer (GCP) Practice Exam

Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer (GCP)

About Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer (GCP)

Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer exam enables candidates working in the organizations to design and implement a secure infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform. Candidates are required to get a thorough understanding of security best practices and industry security requirements, this individual designs, develops, and manages a secure infrastructure leveraging Google security technologies.

Who should take the exam?

Candidates preparing for Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer (GCP) exam are cloud Security Professional. They are required to be proficient in all aspects of Cloud Security which include -

Managing identity and access management
Defining organizational structure and policies
Using Google technologies to provide data protection
Configuring network security defenses
Collecting and analyzing Google Cloud Platform logs
Managing incident responses
Understanding of regulatory concerns

Skills Measured

Professional Cloud Security Engineer exam assesses your ability to -

Configure access within a cloud solution environment
Configure network security
Ensure data protection
Manage operations within a cloud solution environment
Ensure compliance

Exam Format

Exam Duration: 2 hours
Exam Languages: English
Exam format: Multiple choice and multiple select
Prerequisites: None
Recommended experience: 3+ years of industry experience including 1+ years designing and managing solutions using GCP.

Course Outline

The Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer (GCP) exam covers the latest and updated topics -

Domain 1: Configuring access (~25%)

1.1 Managing Cloud Identity. Considerations include:

Configuring Google Cloud Directory Sync and implement single sign-on (SSO) with a third-party identity provider.
Managing a super administrator account.
Automating the user lifecycle management process.
Administering user accounts and groups programmatically.
Configuring Workforce Identity Federation

1.2 Managing service accounts. Considerations include:

Securing and protecting service accounts (including default service accounts).
Identifying scenarios requiring service accounts.
Creating, disabling, and authorizing service accounts.
Securing, auditing, and mitigating the usage of service account keys.
Managing and creating short-lived credentials.
Configuring Workload Identity Federation.
Managing service account impersonation.

1.3 Managing authentication. Considerations include:

Creating a password and session management policy for user accounts.
Setting up Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and OAuth.
Configuring and enforcing 2-step verification.

1.4 Managing and implementing authorization controls. Considerations include:

Managing privileged roles and separation of duties with Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and permissions.
Managing IAM and access control list (ACL) permissions.
Granting permissions to different types of identities using IAM conditions and IAM deny policies.
Defining access control at the organization, folder, project, and resource level using the principle of least privilege.
Configuring Access Context Manager.
Applying Policy Intelligence.
Managing permissions through groups.
Identifying use cases and configuring Privileged Access Manager.

1.5 Defining the resource hierarchy. Considerations include:

Managing folders and projects at scale.
Managing pre-built or custom organization policies for the organization, folders, and projects.
Using the resource hierarchy for access control and permissions inheritance.

Domain 2: Securing communications and establishing boundary protection (~22%)

2.1 Designing and configuring perimeter security. Considerations include:

Configuring network perimeter controls (e.g., Cloud Next Generation Firewall [Cloud NGFW] rules and policies, Identity-Aware Proxy [IAP], load balancers, and Certificate Authority Service).
Setting up application layer inspection on Cloud NGFW (e.g., layer 7).
Differentiating between private and public IP addressing.
Configuring web application firewalls (e.g., Google Cloud Armor).
Deploying Secure Web Proxy.
Configuring Cloud DNS security settings.
Continually monitoring and restricting configured APIs.

2.2 Configuring boundary segmentation. Considerations include:

Configuring security properties of a VPC network, VPC peering, Shared VPC, and firewall rules.
Configuring network isolation and data encapsulation for N-tier applications.
Identifying use cases and configuring VPC Service Controls.

2.3 Establishing private connectivity. Considerations include:

Designing and configuring private connectivity between VPC networks and Google Cloud projects (Shared VPC, VPC peering, and Private Google Access for on-premises hosts).
Designing and configuring private connectivity and encryption between data centers and VPC network (e.g., HA VPN, Cloud Interconnect).
Establishing private connectivity between VPC and Google APIs (Private Google Access, Private Google Access for on-premises hosts, restricted Google access, Private Service Connect).
Using Cloud NAT to enable outbound traffic.

Domain 3: Ensuring data protection (~23%)

3.1 Protecting sensitive data and preventing data loss. Considerations include:

Configuring Sensitive Data Protection (SDP) (e.g., discovering and redacting personally identifiable information (PII), configuring pseudonymization and format preserving encryption).
Restricting access to Google Cloud data services (e.g., BigQuery, Cloud Storage, and Cloud SQL datastores).
Securing secrets with Secret Manager.
Protecting and managing compute instance metadata.

3.2 Managing encryption at rest, in transit, and in use. Considerations include:

Identifying use cases for Google default encryption, customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK), and Cloud External Key Manager (EKM).
Determining when to use software and hardware keys
Creating and managing encryption keys for CMEK and EKM (e.g., key rotation and revocation, key import).
Applying encryption methods to various use cases.
Configuring object lifecycle policies for Cloud Storage.
Enabling Confidential Computing.

3.3 Securing AI workloads. Considerations include:

Implementing security and privacy controls for AI/ML systems to protect against unintentional exploitation of data or models.
Determining security requirements for IaaS-hosted and PaaS-hosted training models.
Implementing security controls for Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.

Domain 4: Managing operations (~19%)

4.1 Automating infrastructure and application security. Considerations include:

Automating security scanning for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) through a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.
Configuring Binary Authorization to secure GKE clusters or Cloud Run.
Automating virtual machine and container image creation (e.g., hardening, maintenance, VM patch management).
Managing policy and drift detection at scale (e.g., cloud security posture management, custom organization policies and custom modules for Security Health Analytics).

4.2 Configuring logging, monitoring, and detection. Considerations include:

Configuring and analyzing network logs (Cloud Next Generation Firewall [Cloud NGFW], VPC flow logs, Packet Mirroring, Cloud Intrusion Detection System [Cloud IDS], Log Analytics).
Designing an effective logging strategy.
Logging, monitoring, responding to, and remediating security incidents.
Designing secure access to logs.
Exporting logs to external security systems.
Configuring and analyzing Google Cloud Audit Logs and data access logs.
Configuring log exports (log sinks and aggregated sinks).
Configuring and monitoring Security Command Center.

Domain 5: Supporting compliance requirements (~11%)

5.1 Adhering to regulatory and industry standards requirements for the cloud. Considerations include:

Determining technical needs relative to compute, data, network, and storage.
Evaluating the shared responsibility model.
Configuring security controls within cloud environments to support compliance requirements (e.g., Assured Workloads, organizational policies, Access Transparency, Access Approval, regionalization of data and services).
Determining the Google Cloud environment in scope for regulatory compliance.
Mapping compliance requirements to Google Cloud services and security controls (e.g., network and access segmentation, audit log coverage).

For more details visit: Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer (GCP)

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