GCP - IAM, Principals & Org Policies Enum

👉 Overview

👀 What ?

Google Cloud Platform's Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a unified system that defines what roles (principals) are available in your organization, what actions they can perform, and on what resources. The organization policies provide granular, resource-level control over your cloud resources.

🧐 Why ?

Using IAM effectively is a crucial aspect of maintaining security and operational efficiency in GCP. Without proper IAM, you risk unauthorized access to your resources, potential data loss, and violation of compliance requirements. Organization policies add an extra layer of security by allowing you to set constraints across your entire resource hierarchy.

⛏️ How ?

To implement IAM, first, you need to understand the IAM roles that are available in your organization. They include primitive roles (Owner, Editor, Viewer), predefined roles, and custom roles which you can create according to your needs. After identifying roles, assign them to principals (users, groups, service accounts, or domains) that should have those permissions. For organization policies, navigate to the 'Organization policies' page in the GCP console, select the policy you want to apply and configure it to meet your needs.

⏳ When ?

IAM and organization policies should be implemented as soon as you start using GCP. They can, however, be updated and modified as your organization's needs change.

⚙️ Technical Explanations

At its core, IAM in Google Cloud Platform is about three things: who (principals), can do what (roles), on which resources. A principal can be a user, a service account, a GSuite domain, or a group. Roles are a collection of permissions that can be assigned to principals. Permissions are the basic units in GCP's IAM system that define a particular action that can be performed on a resource. Organization policies are a way to set fine-grained access controls and constraints at the organization level, folder level, and project level. They work in conjunction with IAM to offer security and governance across your entire GCP resource hierarchy.