By Robert Sadowski, Trust and Security Marketing, Google Cloud

We aim to be the most secure cloud, but what does that mean? If you’re coming to Google Cloud Next '18 next month in San Francisco, now is your chance to identify and understand the technologies and best practices that set Google Cloud Platform (GCP) apart from other cloud providers. There are dozens of breakout sessions dedicated to security, but if time is short, here are six sessions that will give you a solid understanding of foundational GCP security practices and offerings, as well as insight into the cutting-edge security research and development being done by our team.

1. How Google Protects Your Data at Rest and in Transit

First things, first. Come learn how Google protects your data within Google infrastructure, when it’s stored on disk as well as when it moves across our network, for use by various services. Google Cloud Security and Privacy Product Managers Maya Kaczorowski and Il-Sung Lee will also cover additional protections you can put in place such as Customer-Managed Encryption Keys, IPsec tunnels, and Istio. More details are available here.

2. How Google's Security Infrastructure Design Enabled Rapid, Seamless Response to “Spectre” and “Meltdown”

Not content to sit back and wait, Google has a huge team of security researchers that actively push the limits of our systems. This year, researchers found two significant vulnerabilities in modern compute architectures: Spectre and Meltdown. This session will detail those vulnerabilities, and more to the point, how we remediated them transparently, without customer downtime. Learn more here.

3. BeyondCorp Beyond Google

New Google employees always marvel at how they can access Google resources from anywhere, without a VPN. That’s made possible by our BeyondCorp model, and core BeyondCorp technologies such as global scale security proxies, phishing-resistant 2nd factor authentication, and laptop security enforcement are increasingly available to Google Cloud customers. In this session, French resource management provider VEOLIA describes how it built out a BeyondCorp model on Google Cloud to reach 169,000 employees across five continents. Register for the session here.

4. Trust Through (Access) Transparency

'When do you access my data, and how will I know?' is a question that troubles every cloud customer who cares about their data—and one that few cloud providers have an answer for. This talk reviews Google's robust data protection infrastructure, and introduces Google's new Access Transparency product, which gives customers near-real-time oversight over data accesses by Google's administrators. The talk also guides customers through how to audit accesses and mitigate against this risk, together with examples from our customers of where this has successfully been done. Register for the session here.

5. Google Cloud: Data Protection and Regulatory Compliance

Security in the cloud is much more than encryption and firewalls. If you’re subject to regulations, you often need to demonstrate data protection and compliance with a variety of regulatory standards. In this session, we cover recent trends in the data protection space, such as GDPR, and share tools you can leverage to help address your compliance needs. You'll learn how you can partner with Google to enhance data security and meet global regulatory obligations. You can find a full session description here.

6. Shield Your Cloud with Verifiable Advanced Platform Security

Last but not least, you’ll definitely want to attend this session by Googlers Andrew Honig and
Nelly Porter, as they discuss issues facing VM security in the cloud, and an interesting new approach to mitigate against local code gaining escalation privileges. After attending this session, you’ll understand how we prevent workloads running on Google Cloud Platform from being penetrated by boot malware or firmware rootkits. Register for the session here.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Security runs through everything we do at Google Cloud. In addition to these six sessions, there are 31 other breakout sessions dedicated to security, not to mention keynotes and supersessions, hands-on labs, meetups and bootcamps. Don’t delay, register for Next today.