CIS (Center for Internet Security, Inc.) today announced the availability of its CIS Hardened Images on Shielded Virtual Machines (VMs) in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Marketplace.
CIS Hardened Images are virtual machine images that have been preconfigured according to the security recommendations of the CIS Benchmarks. A CIS Hardened Image incorporates the security recommendations outlined in the CIS Benchmark applicable to the operating system.
“Bringing CIS Hardened Images to Shielded VMs on the Google Cloud Platform provides protection against rootkits,” said Curtis Dukes, CIS Executive Vice President, Security Best Practices & Automation Group. “Together, CIS and Google are delivering a secure platform in the cloud customers can trust to protect their critical applications.”
Shielded VMs ensure organizations are only using trusted, supported images. Shielded VMs on Google Cloud are beneficial because they:
- Protect VMs against advanced threats;
- Ensure workloads are trusted and verifiable;
- Protect secrets against exfiltration and replay;
- Offer live migration and patching.
There is no additional cost for a Shielded VM on Google Cloud, and bring your own (BYO) image licensing is supported as well.
CIS Hardened Images available on Shielded VMs include:
- Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter – Level 1 and Level 2
- Windows Server 2016 Datacenter – Level 1 and Level 2
- CentOS 7 – Level 1
- Ubuntu 18.04 LTS – Level 1
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 – Level 1
More information is available at: https://www.cisecurity.org/blog/cis-hardened-images-built-on-google-shielded-vms/.
