Automating & Optimizing Google Cloud User Provisioning

Last updated on May 17th, 2023 at 12:56pm

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) brings its focus on security into GCP user provisioning, offering customers tools and best practices for creating, managing, and deleting user accounts and access permissions to various GCP resources. When you integrate Kion into GCP, you gain even better control over cloud user provisioning, enabling you to stay secure and compliant.

Here’s a look at some of the considerations and best practices that drive GC user provisioning.

Key Considerations for Planning GCP User Provisioning

Here are some top considerations for planning Google Cloud user provisioning:

• Define appropriate Identity Access Management (IAM) roles and permissions to limit access to GCP resources based on the principle that the least privilege is part of the user provisioning process. IAM is a fundamental GCP service that supports access control, authorization, and IAM policy for resources.
• Enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), a best practice for user provisioning to prevent unauthorized access to your organization’s resources.
• Ensure a Segregation of Duties (SoD), a practice of separating job duties and responsibilities to prevent errors, fraud, or security breaches. SoD is a consideration for GCP user provisioning to avoid conflicts of interest or potential security risks.
• Include compliance requirements such as Systems and Organization Controls 2 (SOC 2), International Standards Organization 27001 (ISO 27001), and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) as part of your user provisioning process. Compliance requirements may dictate user provisioning policies, such as regular user access reviews, password policies, and audit logs. Define and document a straightforward user lifecycle management process because user provision is ongoing, from user onboarding to maintenance and offboarding. You must also define the roles of your HR, IT, and security teams, the major stakeholders in user provisioning.

It’s important to remember that GCP supports Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), a technical foundation of cloud user provisioning that enables secure and seamless authentication and authorization for cloud-based applications and services. SAML allows for the exchange of identity and access information between the identity provider (IdP) and the service provider (SP), allowing users to access multiple applications and services with a single set of credentials.

GCP User Provisioning Best Practices

Here are some best practices for GCP user provisioning.

Use Groups to Simplify User Provisioning

Creating groups is a best practice to help simplify GCP user provisioning because it enables you to manage permissions and access levels for multiple users simultaneously. It’s a simple yet effective practice for ensuring consistency in access levels and permissions across your user community. For example, a group you create for your finance department isn’t going to have the same level of permissions and access levels as the group you create for your IT department.

Conduct Regular Reviews and Audits

GCP documentation emphasizes regular reviews and audits of user permissions and access levels to ensure that your users have the appropriate level of access to GCP services for their job roles. Regular reviews and audits can also help you prevent unauthorized access and related security issues.

Follow the Principle of Least Privilege

GCP recommends following the principle of least privilege when provisioning users. It grants your users the minimum amount of access necessary to perform their job responsibilities. This provisioning strategy can help prevent issues such as excessive permissions and unauthorized access. Getting started with the principle of least privilege begins by assigning the predefined GCP roles and creating custom roles for each of your organization’s departments.

The principle of least privilege is a practice that you should adopt as a standard for your organization and carry over to the Kion platform because of its effectiveness.

4 Reasons for Automating GCP User Provisioning

Automation is key to better management of user provisioning in your organization. Here are four reasons for automating GCP user provisioning:

• Saves time and effort by streamlining the process of creating and managing user accounts, which is useful if you have many users to manage or need to create and delete user accounts frequently.
• Ensures that user accounts are created and managed consistently across your organization. Such consistency helps prevent errors and ensure users have access to the resources they need.
• Improves security by ensuring that user accounts are created with appropriate access levels and permissions. This can help to prevent unauthorized access and protect sensitive data.
• As your organization grows, automating user provisioning can help you scale your user management processes more easily. Automation helps you to manage a larger number of users without increasing the workload on your IT team.

Use a Cloud Management Platform for Automation

Another cloud user provisioning best practice that GCP recommends is using a third-party tool to automate user provisioning. Kion integrates with GCP, allowing you to automate user provisioning and management tasks. The Kion platform also enables you to integrate with your other backend systems, such as HR and workforce management to ensure your teams are working with the latest user data.

Get Started with GCP User Provisioning

Here’s a high-level overview of getting started with GCP user provisioning:

1. Set up a GCP account and create a project.
2. Define the roles and permissions that you want to assign to users. Start with predefined roles or create custom roles based on your requirements.
3. Create a user account in the Cloud Identity or Google Workspace Admin console.
4. Assign the necessary roles and permissions to the user account.
5. Perform one of the following options to automate user provisioning:

• Use Cloud Identity or Google Workspace to automate user provisioning by configuring the necessary settings.
• Use the Google IAM API to manage user accounts, roles, and permissions.
• Use Kion with its Automation & Orchestration features.

Conclusion

While Google Cloud Platform offers capable user provisioning tools, standardizing on Kion for user provisioning helps centralize provisioning, role-based access control, automated provisioning, and scalability, which benefits your cloud and IT teams by delivering the tools and reporting to tackle a full range of user provisioning use cases. GC also stresses best practices, including using groups to simplify user provisioning, conducting regular reviews and audits, following the principle of least privilege, and automating user provisioning. Adopting Kion and GC together helps scale your user provisioning and management practices more efficiently, leading to an improved experience for your admins and end users alike.