Why protecting your Google Cloud environment matters
Google Cloud projects grow continuously as resources are provisioned by different teams, applications, and automation. That makes it easy for resources to become difficult to track.
- No built-in inventory discipline: resources created by hand or by automation can drift out of sight, making it hard to know what’s actually running, let alone what’s protected.
- Manual upkeep doesn’t scale: registering every resource and keeping track of changes by hand quickly falls behind as a Google Cloud project grows.
- A compromised project can affect everything: credentials with broad permissions can give an attacker access to multiple resources across the project at once.
Security and Compromise
Access to Google Cloud resources is controlled through IAM roles and service account keys. If those credentials leak or permissions are too broad, the impact can extend well beyond a single resource:
- Project-wide impact: an attacker with sufficiently broad permissions can create, modify, or delete resources across the project.
- Data loss and disruption: compromised resources can be deleted, reconfigured, or used to access and exfiltrate data.
- No clear view of what is affected: without an up-to-date inventory, it is harder to determine which resources exist and what may have been impacted.
Plakar mitigates this by continuously discovering Google Cloud resources and keeping their inventory synchronized.
How Plakar protects your Google Cloud environment
Plakar integrates with Google Cloud in one way:
- Inventory: connect to a Google Cloud project and automatically discover the resources running in it, such as Cloud Storage buckets and CloudSQL instances, keeping that inventory synchronized as resources are created or removed.
Once discovered, resources can be protected with encrypted, deduplicated backups and restores through their respective integrations.
