I know security is not compliance, and I'm not here to compare the two, but Google goes to great lengths to protect security. [0]

TL;DR:

- Google's global SDN is ultra-secure, and Google carries your packets on its network rather than dumping them onto public web. Google's undersea cables are shark bite-proof! [1]

- Google Data Centers are mostly homogeneous and rely on Google-build hardware rather than vendors. This greatly helps with securing infra - only one vendor (Google) to trust, only one set of best practices to follow, lower risk of misconfiguration, and exposure risk is minimal.

- > 600 security engineers.

- Encryption-at-rest and in-transit is ubiquitous.

[0] https://cloud.google.com/security/whitepaper

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMxkRh7sx84

(work on Google Cloud, not in marketing :) )

I can't find "ultra-secure" in any of our security certification docs. Is that better or worse than "super-duper secure"?

For security, I don't care whether my traffic as routed over a private network or public web as long as the data is encrypted, because a "private network" is only as private as thousands of miles of fiber and every single network facility it traverses can be. Which means 'not very'.

Does Google build it's own hard drives/SSD's and CPU's? If not, then that's at least 2 other vendors to trust since both CPU's and hard drives are related to hardware security.

Ha.ha. Did I mention I'm not in marketing? I do appreciate your passion!

On your first point. There is a very strong risk of inadvertent misconfiguration or your employees not following best practices.. Or even poor documentation. Google cloud by default gives you a global secure vpc that never traverses public internet, so there's less risk because the baseline of security is high. Sure, you can run VPN tunnels between data centers. Point is, with Google cloud you don't need to.

On the latter point, of course you cannot eradicate every vendor, especially within the obvious context of this specific Intel announcement... But, again, not having three dozen flavors of configs and four network router vendors does make a difference. I would encourage you to read the paper I linked to above (discussed this topic in great detail), and also perhaps [0].

Also security folks at Google, who are much more qualified to discuss this topic than I am, frequently post on hn. [1]

[0] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/02/Google-seeks-ne...

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13388941

AWS did a lot of work to improve how they share compliance information over the past year. It wasn't much better than Google's reference before that. Azure beats both of them in my opinion, as you can access many of the raw compliance reports without an NDA.

It's also important to pay attention to which services you consume, as not all of them are certified to the same degree.

As far as HIPAA compliance goes, though, AWS EC2 requires dedicated tenancy, whereas GCE allows HIPAA workloads on any VM, including preemptible VMs.

This is true, however Amazon's standard BAA is a bit more robust than Google's. This didn't stop my HIPAA-compliant company from choosing Google, but it does make it more difficult to compare the two clouds on HIPAA-friendliness.

Can you say more about what you found less robust? And (hopefully) were you unable to get the legal agreement up to snuff by the end?

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but not compliance).

There's been a lot of talk in the compliance gcp slack on this, seems like a lot of products are being audited and announcements will be made at Next.

Let's hope they are building the managed Postgres product from the ground up with an eye toward compliance!

Well, since mysql compatible Cloud SQL is, I would imagine pg would be too.

AWS launched Postgres RDS in November 2013. They covered MySQL and Oracle RDS under BAA in August 2015. But AWS didn't add Postgres RDS to the BAA until November 2016. We're hoping GCP doesn't delay covering Postgres Cloud SQL under BAA like AWS did with their managed Postgres.