Google added a security analytics product that identifies misconfigurations and compliance violations in companies’ Google Cloud Platform environments.

The new product, now in beta, is called Security Health Analytics and it integrates into Cloud Security Command Center (Cloud SCC). It includes a dashboard that shows potential security problems, called findings, and when a user clicks on a finding it provides a remediation plan for solving the problem and a link that goes directly to the vulnerable resource.

AirAsia is an early customer. In a blog post, Kyle Olive, product manager at Google Cloud, said the low-cost airline uses Google Kubernetes Engine to spin up containers and virtual machines (VMs) in Google Cloud, and also uses App Engine to build applications. It now also uses Security Health Analytics to ensure that its cloud resources are configured properly and compliant with Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks.

The CIS certified Security Health Analytics to monitor Google Cloud Platform Foundation benchmarks, which provide recommendations for keeping GCP resources secure and compliant. For example: it can identify and remediate storage buckets that are publicly accessible, thus helping to prevent a data breach before it occurs.

“Being able to go to the new Security Health Analytics dashboard eliminates the guesswork of what we have running and if it is secure,” said Muhammad Faeez Bin Azmi, information security and automation solution architect at Google, in the blog post. “Now anyone on our team, even non-security professionals, can go to this dashboard and see a list of the misconfigured assets and compliance violations across all of our GCP resources. We can also see the severity of misconfigurations, which helps us prioritize our response.”

The new security product follows a slew of product upgrades and acquisitions as Google puts the full-court press on enterprise customers and tries to wrestle cloud market share from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Courting Enterprise Customers

Last month Google updated its Anthos hybrid-cloud platform with a new service mesh and Cloud Run serverless capabilities. This followed its Migrate for Anthos service that allows users to take a VM from on-premises or Google Compute Engine (GCE) and move it directly into containers running in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Those VMs can also be migrated directly from AWS’ EC2 and Microsoft Azure into containers running in GCE.

Over the summer it added VM types on GCE including second-generation Intel Xeon scalable processor machines and new VMs for compute- and memory-heavy applications. Around the same time Google also added several new cloud security features.

Additionally, Google and VMware partnered to support VMware workloads running in Google Cloud — another move that gives Google access to VMware's enterprise customers. And the cloud provider spent billions scooping up startups including enterprise file storage startup Elastifile, data analytics provider Looker, and security startup (and sister company) Chronicle.

Cloud Wars

In July Google CEO Sundar Pichai said its cloud reached an annual revenue run rate of more than $8 billion, which was surprising because the company’s executives typically don’t provide specifics about the cloud business revenue.

So while it may be an indicator that Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian is moving the needle in his mission to take market share from cloud leaders AWS and Azure, the cloud giant still has a ways to go.

A recent Gartner report put Google as the No. 4 worldwide provider of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), while a Synergy Research Group report noted Google was No. 3 in cloud infrastructure services market share during the second quarter of 2019.