Inspecting and De-Identifying Data With Google Cloud Data Loss Prevention

Data has become an essential and key store of value for enterprises. Because of this, companies need to protect and handle data in a secure and efficient way. Following this guideline, Google offers Cloud Data Loss Prevention (CDLP). This is a fully managed service that helps you analyze, inspect, and de-identify your data. By using CDLP, you can inspect millions of data and understand which of them are sensitive and should be de-identified or encrypted. You can also automatically let it mask your sensitive data (this operation is known as de-identifying). CDLP has more than one hundred infoTypes. An infoType is a type that represents a piece of sensitive information, such as a date, a name, an email address or a phone number. When you let CDLP de-identify your data, it will mask all pieces of information that are associated with one of the predefined infoTypes.

In this lab, you will upload data to a Cloud Storage bucket, you will start an inspection of this data to understand whether it contains sensitive information, and you will de-identify sensitive information by using REST APIs.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this lab you will be able to:

• Set up an inspection of data stored in Cloud Storage
• Review the result of inspection to understand whether data contains sensitive information
• De-identify sensitive data inside a text file

Intended Audience

This lab is intended for:

• Google Cloud Professional Security Engineer (PSE) certification candidates
• Security Engineers who want to handle data in a secure and efficient way
• Individuals who want to let GCP identify sensitive information and mask it

Prerequisites

This lab has no prerequisites.

 

Updates

September 26th, 2023 - Resolved validation check issue

May 30th, 2023 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

January 14th, 2022 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

April 9th, 2021 - Updated screenshots and instructions in order to match the new UI