Google Cloud believes the answer to overworked security teams isn’t just more tools, but an AI-powered ally.
At its Security Summit 2025, Google laid out its vision for a future where AI frees up human security experts from tedious work to focus on what matters most.
The central idea is to use AI to defend your organisation while securing your own AI initiatives from attack. As businesses increasingly rely on AI agents, these agents themselves become a new frontier for security concerns.
Securing the AI ecosystem
Before AI can become a trusted defender, its own environment must be secure. To this end, Google Cloud is enhancing its AI Protection solution within the Security Command Center.
New capabilities, arriving soon in preview, will automatically discover all the AI agents and servers in your environment. This will give security teams a clear view of their entire AI agent ecosystem, helping them to spot vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and risky interactions.
Real-time protection is also getting a boost. Model Armor’s in-line protection is being extended to prompts and responses within Agentspace, helping to block threats like prompt injection and data leaks as they happen.
To ensure AI agents are always playing by the rules, new posture controls will help them stick to company security policies. And with new threat detections powered by intelligence from Mandiant and Google Cloud, security teams can now better spot and respond to unusual or suspicious behaviour from their AI assets.
Rise of the agentic SOC
Perhaps the most forward-looking announcement is Google’s vision for an “agentic security operations centre (SOC)”. Imagine a system where AI agents collaborate to manage threats, automate alert investigations, and even help engineers create new detections to fill security gaps.
The first step in this direction is the new Alert Investigation agent, which is now in preview. This tool acts like a junior analyst, autonomously looking into security events, analysing command-line activity, and mapping out process trees based on the proven methods of Mandiant’s frontline experts. The agent provides its verdict on alerts and suggests next steps for human analysts, promising to cut down on manual work and speed up response times.
AI security built on Google Cloud’s unified foundation
In Google Security Operations, the new SecOps Labs gives users early access to powerful capabilities, many of which are powered by Gemini AI. New dashboards that bring together security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) data are also now generally available, giving a clearer picture of an organisation’s security posture.
The platform’s foundation, the Trusted Cloud, is also receiving upgrades:
- Compliance and risk: A new Compliance Manager simplifies the complex world of audits and policy enforcement, while new Risk Reports use virtual red team technology to find security gaps that attackers could exploit.
- Smarter access control: The tedious task of granting permissions gets an AI assist with the new IAM role picker, now in preview. You can simply describe what a person or service needs to do, and Gemini will recommend the most secure, least-permissive role. To guard against account takeovers, re-authentication will now be triggered for highly sensitive actions.
- Expanded data and network security: Sensitive Data Protection has been expanded to cover AI tools like Vertex AI, and Cloud NGFW now helps apply Zero Trust principles to high-performance computing workloads, including AI.
By embedding AI into the core of its offerings, Google Cloud is working to create a foundation where security enables business goals and helps defenders tackle the challenges of a new era.
(Photo by Ameer Basheer)
See also: Why security chiefs demand urgent regulation of AI like DeepSeek
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