Do you think IIT Guwahati certified course can help you in your career?
Introduction
Administrators of Google Cloud organisations can define fine-grained, attribute-based access control for projects and resources in Google Cloud using Access Context Manager.
An access policy, which serves as an organisational container for access levels and service perimeters, is initially defined by administrators.
Access levels outline the conditions for honouring requests.
Examples comprise:
Operating system and kind of device
IP addresses
users' names
Service perimeters outline resource sandboxes that permit free data interaction inside the perimeter but forbid exporting data outside of it. Policy enforcement is not the responsibility of the Access Context Manager. Its goal is to lay down the desired regulations. VPC Service Controls, for example, is one location where policy can be configured and implemented.
Access Policies
All of your Access Context Manager's resources, such as access levels and service perimeters, are contained within an access policy.
An access policy can be made in the context of an organization, and it can be applied anywhere inside the company.
You can construct a scoped access policy and specify the scope to the folder or project level to delegate administration of an access policy.
The organization-level access policy cannot be managed by the delegated administrator who is given control of the scoped access policy.
Check out this documentation on how to create an Access Policy:
Based on the context of the request, access levels are utilized to grant access to resources. Tiers of trust can be organized using access levels. For instance, you may designate an access level called High Level that will accept requests from a select number of extremely privileged people.
You might alternatively choose a more inclusive group to trust, like an IP range you want to allow requests from. If so, you might construct a Medium Level access level to allow those requests.
Enforcement agencies can use your defined access levels to decide whether to comply with a request. For instance, you may state that while "Medium Trust" has access to a lot of resources, "High Trust" is needed for certain of the more delicate resources. In addition to the usual Identity and Access Management policy, these checks are used.
IP Address
Depending on the IP address of the request's origin, you can grant a certain amount of access. A Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) block is used to specify the IP range to be allowed, allowing for straightforward yet precise control over the IPs that are allowed.
Multiple IP ranges may be contained inside a single access level.
Device Type
Endpoint Verification is used by Access Context Manager to collect details about user devices, such as operating system and version. Based on this information, you can assign an access level. For instance, you might opt to provide devices running the most recent version of the principal operating system installed at your organisation at a higher access level.
User Identity
You might want to assign a specific entity a certain access level in various circumstances. The caller's identity in this instance decides whether the condition is satisfied.
To allow a Cloud Function to access data secured by VPC Service Controls, for instance, this scenario is frequently used in conjunction with Service Accounts and VPC Service Controls.
The Google Cloud console does not support managing identity-only access levels; however, the gcloud command-line utility does.
Combining Conditions
Multiple conditions can be included in a single access level. The AND or OR operators can be used to examine the conditions. When making changes to or creating an access level, you can define the mode.
The more restrictive (and default) option is the AND case. The Access Level is only given if all requirements are met. For instance, you can require a request to originate from a device running the newest operating system and from within the corporate network.
OR is a less limiting choice. Only one of the numerous conditions must be true. When dealing with user IDs, for instance, this can be useful to exempt particular entities (like Service Accounts) from the norm.
Nested Condition
It is possible to nest conditions so that they are dependent on one another. For instance, if you have "Medium" and "High" trust access levels, you can make "High" need "Medium" in addition to other conditions.
Managing access levels may be easier under nesting conditions. For instance, suppose you set your more restrictive access levels to rely on the minimum operating system version specified in your most permissive access level. In the future, updating the minimum version will just need changing one condition as opposed to each access level in the policy.
Check out this documentation for the creation of Access Level for Access Context Manager
Along with an access policy that you may apply to the entire business, scoped policies are access policies that are restricted to particular folders or projects. Administrators of folder- and project-level administrators can be given control over the perimeters and access levels of VPC Service Controls through the use of scoped policies.
A single organizational-level access policy may be used by an organisation, and it may be applied to any folder or project within the organisation.
Scoped Policies Management
You have the ability to establish, alter, and remove scoped policies as an Access Context Manager administrator at the organisational level. On the Access Context Manager policy, you can explicitly specify Identity and Access Management (IAM) bindings, allowing you to further delegate the management of Access Context Manager policy to other people inside the company. Service perimeters and access levels can be configured in policies by a scoped policy administrator. Administrators of policies that are scoped, however, are unable to make new policies or modify existing ones so that they apply to different projects or folders.
The steps administrators take to manage the scoped policies are listed below:
The scope field of a new access policy is created by the organization-level administrator and references a particular folder or project.
On the access policy resource, the organization-level administrator directly grants the delegated administrator IAM permissions. The scoped policy now has permissions for the delegated administrator, but no other policies do, unless the organization-level administrator specifically grants them to the delegated administrator.
Now that access levels and service perimeters have been configured, the delegated administrator can change the policy. Any other user may also be given IAM permissions under that policy by the delegated administrator.
Scope Policies Hierarchy
All resources that are a part of an organisation are children of the organisation resource, which serves as the root node of the Google Cloud resource hierarchy. Projects are grouped together using folders. The organisation resource has child nodes that are folders and projects.
The following restrictions are applicable to a service perimeter or access level in a scoped policy in the example organisation:
A scoped policy's service perimeters can only limit the resources that fall under its purview. Because the projects are in the engineering folder, a service perimeter in a policy with the engineering folder as its scope can secure the example-dev, example-prod, and example-test projects.
The service perimeters in the scoped policy cannot secure any of the example-dev, example-prod, or example-test projects if it applies to the sales folder. However, by using entrance and egress rules, the service perimeter in the scoped policy might grant access to projects in other folders.
Only those who fall under the policy's purview can see the access levels in a scoped policy. Only service perimeters and access levels in the engineering folder can use an access level that you define in a policy that is scoped to that folder. The access level specified in the engineering folder cannot be used by service perimeters or access levels in other folders.
Custom Access Levels
You can construct access levels that allow access to data based on the context of a request using Access Context Manager. Although there is currently a way to create basic access levels in Access Context Manager, you may also construct unique access levels. Your company can utilise custom access levels to authorise access to Google Cloud resources using the device and context information provided by external security and endpoint management suppliers.
The attributes of a client making a request are tested using boolean expressions expressed
in a subset of Common Expression Language (CEL) by custom access levels.
When you build an access level in the Google Cloud dashboard, bespoke access levels are set up using Advanced Mode
Check out this documentation if you wanna know how to create custom Access Levels
Administrators of Google Cloud organisations can define fine-grained, attribute-based access control for projects and resources in Google Cloud using Access Context Manager. An access policy, which serves as an organisational container for access levels and service perimeters, is initially defined by administrators.
Are Scoped policies necessary in Access Context Manager?
Yes they are necessary because scoped policies are access policies that are restricted to particular folders or projects. Administrators of folder- and project-level administrators can be given control over the perimeters and access levels of VPC Service Controls through the use of scoped policies.
Can we grant a certain amount of access depending on the IP?
Yes you can depending on the IP address of the request's origin, you can grant a certain amount of access.
What do you mean by combining conditions?
Multiple conditions can be included in a single access level. The AND or OR operators can be used to examine the conditions. When making changes to or creating an access level, you can define the mode.
What type of verification method is used by Access Context Manager?
Endpoint Verification is used by Access Context Manager to collect details about user devices.
Conclusion
In this article, we learned about Access Context Manager and also Access Levels and Access Policies that come under the Access Context Manager.
For more cloud related information you can refer to the following articles:
85+ registered 