Mastering IAM Deny Policies in Google Cloud Best Practices and Implementation Guide Solutions Talk
AI Summary
The video titled “The Power of No” by Kevin Schmidt, a Google Cloud Consulting engineer, discusses the importance of using IAM Deny policies in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to strengthen security by explicitly denying certain permissions instead of relying solely on IAM Allow policies. The talk is aimed at security, identity, and infrastructure experts and covers why IAM Deny matters, how allow and deny policies differ, and best practices for implementation including multi-layer security approaches using org policies and privileged access management.
Key points covered include:
- IAM Allow policies grant permissions based on roles, while IAM Deny policies explicitly restrict permissions.
- Deny policies act as guardrails preventing unauthorized access and can be attached at organization, folder, or project level.
- Deny policies evaluate before allow policies, ensuring denied actions are blocked regardless of allow permissions.
- Use cases include restricting sensitive actions like VPC creation.
- Implementation can start with simple Terraform examples denying specific permissions to service accounts.
- Management of deny policies can leverage tags and conditional expressions for flexible rollout.
- Tools like Policy Troubleshooter and Policy Simulator help debug and simulate policy impacts.
- IAM Recommender helps reduce over-permissioned accounts before applying deny policies.
- Additional security layers include custom org constraints and privileged access management for just-in-time access.
The speaker emphasizes the importance of security team involvement and review before deployment, and invites viewers to reach out for consulting help. The presentation includes some engaging cultural references and encourages practical adoption of these advanced IAM techniques to improve cloud security.