Elastic and Google Cloud: Enhancing security analytics from data ingestion to incident response

Our combined offerings bring a unified solution that simplifies the security management of hybrid environments. By seamlessly integrating threat intelligence, compliance measures, endpoint protection, SIEM capabilities, response strategies, and data ingestion, organizations are equipped to swiftly respond to — and prevent — threats at scale, ensuring continuous security posture improvement.

Moving beyond threat intelligence, our platforms address common security challenges like misconfigurations through tools like Google Cloud's Security Command Center (SCC) and Elastic’s Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM). These tools not only detect but also help remediate configuration issues, enhancing users’ cloud security posture efficiently.

The Google Cloud SCC is an integrated risk platform that natively collects findings, logs, and configuration information from various Google Cloud services. It also provides comprehensive threat detection for Google Cloud that includes Event Threat Detection, Container Threat Detection, and Virtual Machine Threat Detection as built-in services. Through its extended log monitoring and security features, organizations can ingest and analyze the data collected by SCC with the Elastic integration for SCC — enhancing their ability to proactively prevent breaches and remediate security issues. The connection, driven by Elastic Agent, may use both the SCC REST API or Pub/Sub to retrieve data. Then all users have to do is execute their normal security analyst tasks within Elastic Security, backed by this additional strength.

The Elastic and Google Cloud ecosystem offers a wide range of possibilities for moving data from monitored services to security tools, depending on specific needs and architectures.

Elastic Agent: Elastic comes with a multitude of native integrations for Google Cloud and third-party services to ingest, process, search, and visualize security logs. The cornerstone of this capability is Elastic Agent, offering unparalleled versatility for data collection. Elastic Agent streamlines everything from collection to parsing, tailored to the specific source, along with prebuilt dashboards in Kibana to highlight key insights — allowing users retain the flexibility to customize these functionalities as needed.

Elastic Agent often emerges as a favorite, not just for the aforementioned skills but also for its role as an endpoint protection tool within hosting environments. Leveraging machine learning algorithms and behavioral analytics, it enriches user environments with malware detection, preventing potential threats in real time while continuously scanning for vulnerabilities to ensure prompt patching and mitigation. Moreover, Elastic Agent empowers organizations to enforce security policies, initiate endpoint isolation or quarantine measures, and maintain compliance with regulatory requirements — all within a centralized management interface.

A standout feature is the centralized management UI, Fleet. This centralized hub enables users to effortlessly oversee their distributed fleet, whether in cloud or hybrid scenarios. From managing updates to rolling out new policies and tweaking configurations, it's all conveniently orchestrated from a single interface, eliminating the need to log into individual machines.

Elastic Agent facilitates data loading from a plethora of Google Cloud services — spanning from Google Cloud Storage and VMs to Kubernetes, from VPC, firewalls, and functions to Drive and Gmail, or Pub/Sub, among others. Of particular note is the Pub/Sub service, which serves as a proxy to enable seamless data publication from various Google services. Through our Pub/Sub integration, users gain access to the entirety of Google's ecosystem, even in cases where direct integrations may not exist.

Dataflow: For those who prefer an agentless, serverless, and no-code approach, Google Cloud's Dataflow service emerges as a compelling option. This fully managed service simplifies the task of transferring data from your Google landscape to an Elastic index with just a few clicks. Dataflow comes with built-in templates for Elasticsearch.

Logstash: However, in scenarios where data requires preprocessing or enrichment before indexing, a more tailored, code-based approach may be necessary. In this case, Logstash, our open-source processing tool, will help you manipulate and augment content as needed.

Confluent Kafka service: Another option worth exploring involves leveraging common technology partners’ tools such as Kafka, particularly the managed Confluent Kafka service. This widely used technology seamlessly integrates with both Google services and Elastic, serving as a robust middleware solution for ensuring ingest stability, resiliency, and persistence. Discover the benefits of using Kafka with Elastic with the latest released features and through step-by-step tutorials.

Customizable API and SDK: Lastly, for developers seeking a fully customizable experience, our API and SDK for various programming languages provide unrestricted access to Elasticsearch functionalities within their applications.

Looking ahead, our integration with GenAI technologies like Google’s Gemini enhances our capabilities, offering even more guided analytics and automated response solutions. This integration aims to revolutionize how security analytics are performed, embedding advanced AI to streamline security analysts’ daily operations.

Elastic has recently introduced several groundbreaking AI-driven solutions embedded in Elastic Security, substantially streamlining analyst and admin workflows and freeing up hours spent on what would otherwise be manual processes.

Elastic AI Assistant can be easily activated with a few clicks within Elastic Security. It provides users with both prebuilt prompts and freedom of conversational interaction, supported by company-specific context — alerts, logs, and monitored sources — tailored for the user’s large language model (LLM) of choice. 

This enables and simplifies multiple use cases such as alert summarization, workflow suggestion, query generation, and integration advice — strongly reducing analysts’ workloads while leading to thoughtful decisions. And once users are satisfied with the conversation results, they can add them to a timeline investigation or a case to follow up with the investigation.

To leverage the full potential of our integrated security solutions, we encourage you to start with a free 14-day trial cluster on Elastic Cloud using your Google Cloud account or easily subscribe to Elastic Cloud through Google Cloud Marketplace. This is an excellent first step to transforming your security posture and embracing a more proactive and informed security management approach.

Our partnership extends beyond mere technology integration — it's about creating a cohesive and secure ecosystem that supports your organization's security needs dynamically and efficiently. Don't miss out on the opportunity to enhance your security posture with Elastic and Google Cloud’s pioneering solutions.