How secure Google Compute Engine is?

[Arthur Cordova]

Hello.

We're moving to GCE and we want to know how secure it is.

We are going to use:

- A load balancer, who is going to handle the requests.

- Severals VM's to load applications

- And a VM for Databases.

Do we need to install our own intrussion detection/prevention software on our VM Instances? (Tripware, Ossec, Snort). or does GCE handle security by itself? how much must we do in this regard?

We want to protect our CE (compute engine) from:

• Unauthorized access to our files.
  
• Interception of Data.
  

Thanks.

[Faizan (Google Cloud Support)]

Hello Arthur,

You can go through this link for more details on Google Cloud Platform security and compliance. For Google Compute Engine VMs user is responsible to keep the instance and data secure as mentioned in the article:

Google Compute Engine and Google Container Engine are powered by virtual machines (VM). If you use these technologies in your projects, it is your responsibility to keep the VM operating system and applications up to date with the latest security patches. Google maintains security and patching of the host OS environments.

I hope that helps.

Faizan