Veza partners with Google Cloud to secure cloud environments and data from cybercrime and threats
Veza announces that the company has entered a partnership with Google Cloud, including product integration that enables Google Cloud customers to harness the capabilities of Veza’s data security platform across their multi-cloud ecosystem.
Veza, which recently launched in April 2022 after two years of building in stealth, makes it easy to understand, manage, and control who can and should take what action on what data. With this new integration, Google Cloud customers can now directly access the capabilities of Veza’s authorization-based data security platform integrated with Google Cloud Policy Analyzer to identify, manage, and control external identities and service accounts to Google Cloud services (Looker, BigQuery, and more). This partnership furthers the relationship between Google and Veza, which began in 2021 when GV led the Series B investment in Veza and GV Partner Karim Faris joined Veza Board of Directors.
“The cloud is quickly becoming the primary footprint for organizations. By prioritizing and investing in security, Google Cloud has earned a differentiated position in the market,” said Tarun Thakur, Co-founder and CEO, Veza. “The initial product integration between Veza and Google Cloud, publicly demonstrated at the Google Cloud Security Summit in May this year, is a powerful example of how intelligence from Veza’s Authorization Graph can bolster the data security of Google Cloud customers.
“It shows how identity-to-data relationship insights from the Veza platform can be pulled directly into the Google Cloud Policy Analyzer, allowing customers to secure both Google Cloud data (Looker, BigQuery, Google Storage Buckets, etc.) to which multi-cloud identities (AD, Azure AD, Okta, etc.) have permissions and multi-cloud data (AWS, Snowflake, etc.) that is being accessed by Google Cloud identities.”
“Securing cloud environments and data from cybercrime and threats is a key priority of organizations across the globe,” said Sunil Potti, General Manager and Vice President, Cloud Security, Google Cloud. “With Veza’s platform now available alongside Google Cloud’s secure and global infrastructure, customers will be able to quickly deploy the solutions they need to better understand, control, and securely take action on their data across their multi-cloud environments.”
Veza’s data security platform aggregates identity information from humans, service accounts, and cloud IAM entities, and authorization data from apps and data systems, giving organizations a centralized, SaaS-based control plane to visualize, manage, and control data access controls through Veza’s Authorization Graph. Veza integrates with cloud identity providers, SaaS and custom apps, and data systems, and translates system-specific entitlements and permissions into a common, human-understandable business language, visualized in the platform as effective permissions.
The platform brings a novel approach to data security by enabling organizations to address key data security use cases across access reviews and certifications for SaaS apps and data systems, privileged access management to data and apps, data lake security and governance, management of cloud entitlements, and much more. It delivers prioritized insights, provides access workflows, and actionable recommendations for remediation of over-privileged accounts, enabling security and IT teams to correct anomalies and right-size their organization’s permissions to protect against ransomware and other data breaches.
As organizations continue to adapt to the evolving demands of hybrid remote and in-office work, multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments — those with multiple providers of disparate data, app, compute, and infrastructure systems — are becoming the norm. According to the Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report, 89% of companies surveyed are multi-cloud, with only 2% operating in single private clouds and 9% in single public clouds. This trend is leading to a distributed web of data, relationships, and access points that are changing and difficult to track and secure.
Veza and Google Cloud already have a number of joint customers deployed across the industries of SaaS software, marketing technology, and media, including Vox Media.
“To support Vox Media’s growth and increasing M&A activity without compromising security, we need to ensure that across all of our brands, the right users have access only to the data they need access to, and that we have full visibility over what they can do with that data,” says Ateeb Ahmad, Senior Director, IT Infrastructure, Vox Media. With Veza and Google Cloud working together, we’ve been able to seamlessly manage access controls over our data for our largest merger to date, and tightly scope identity-to-data permissions even as our footprint with Google Cloud and other technologies grows.”
“The greatest gifts of the multi-cloud and the generational architectural shift of the modern data systems are also its greatest risks: securing data, scalability, flexibility, and seamless collaboration,” says Thakur. “When organizations enable workers to reach from one cloud to another to leverage data across their entire multi-cloud ecosystem, they foster growth, enable more intelligence, and promote agility.
“However, such apps and data systems are also more porous and are at increased risk of cybercrime and ransomware. We purpose-built Veza’s Core Authorization Platform for the multi-cloud so that organizations can implement strong access governance policies – Veza continuously evaluates these policies and enables both automated workflows for access reviews, automated access removal for toxic and stale combinations, and facilitates access grant and request for any app, data, and service.”