Jointly developed network threat detection service helps cloud customers solve critical security challenges

By : Ahmed Helmy

Palo Alto Networks (NYSE: PANW), the global cybersecurity leader, and Google Cloud today announced Cloud IDS (Intrusion Detection System), a jointly developed network threat detection service to help cloud customers solve critical network security challenges.

Built with Palo Alto Networks’ industry-leading threat detection technologies, Cloud IDS provides simple, managed, cloud native network-based threat detection — offering Google Cloud customers the highest levels of security efficacy in just a few clicks. The new service is the result of a year-long joint design and engineering effort between Google and Palo Alto Networks, focused on combining the best-in-class security of Palo Alto Networks with the simplicity and secure and scalable infrastructure of Google Cloud.

“Businesses are betting on the cloud for their most important initiatives, and one of the most fundamental factors to their success will be security,” said Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks.

“We’ve had a tremendous strategic partnership with Google over the past three years that helps ensure that our joint customers can have a simple, secure journey to the cloud. This service takes that to new levels.”

“Customers demand uncompromising security that is simple to deploy and easy to manage. We built Cloud IDS to address these requirements, by bringing together Palo Alto Networks best-in-class security with Google’s secure and scalable infrastructure,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud.

“This is one of the many ways Google Cloud and Palo Alto Networks are partnering together to deliver solutions that solve our customers' security challenges.”

Until now, detecting threats has been a significant hurdle for cloud network security teams, leading to security policy compliance challenges and blind spots for the security operations center. For organizations that want an easy path to network threat detection, Cloud IDS is a simple to set up, simple to deploy way to gain deep insight into network-based threats and support industry-specific security compliance goals. For more information, see the Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud blog posts. 

Since 2018, Google Cloud and Palo Alto Networks have partnered to protect customers' applications and data as they migrate to the cloud while making that experience as seamless as possible. In 2018, the Palo Alto Networks VM-Series Virtual Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) was first supported on Google Cloud; since then, Palo Alto Networks and Google have built numerous product integrations, including those between Cortex^® XSOAR, the VM-Series, Google Cloud Security Command Center, Chronicle and the Google Cloud Network Connectivity Center. The companies have also produced a joint security reference architecture to help customers secure their Google Cloud environments using best practices. In addition, this week Palo Alto Networks was named 2021 Google Cloud Technology Partner of the Year, a title Palo Alto Networks has been given for three years running.