Google Cloud adds VPC security tools for BlackLine

Google Cloud has introduced new policy intelligence tools for VPC Service Controls, which BlackLine is using to manage security perimeters in its Google Cloud environment.

The release adds a VPC-SC violation analyser and a violation dashboard to help organisations investigate blocked requests and monitor service perimeter breaches across their cloud estates.

The tools are intended to address a common operational challenge for companies using VPC Service Controls to restrict access to sensitive data and services. While those controls can reduce the risk of data exfiltration, compromised accounts and insider threats, they also add management complexity as application connections, access rules and workloads change.

BlackLine, a provider of financial operations management software, uses Google Cloud managed services and built-in security features to protect customer financial data. VPC Service Controls are central to its compliance and security controls in Google Cloud, particularly in separating higher and lower environments.

The new dashboard gives security teams a single view of service perimeter violations across a Google Cloud organisation. It can help identify trends in denied access requests, detect spikes in violations and filter incidents by perimeter, project or identity.

The analyser is aimed at incident response and troubleshooting. Users can enter a troubleshooting token or denial identifier from an error message to generate a report showing the identity involved, the source and target of the request, and the VPC-SC rule that blocked it.

That replaces a more manual process in which administrators search logging records to reconstruct what happened during a denied request. The analyser also links a violation to the relevant policy line, helping teams decide whether to change an existing rule or create a new one.

For BlackLine, the main benefit is reduced time spent on routine investigations. Its administrators can use the toolset to adjust service perimeters through approved access levels, ingress policies and egress policies as business API requirements evolve.

BlackLine described the reporting function as a practical shortcut because it removes the need to write a Cloud Logging SQL query to extract the underlying information. That allows infrastructure and security teams to work from a single report when deciding how to resolve a violation.

“VPC Service Controls are the foundation of BlackLine's preventative compliance and security controls in our Google Cloud environment, helping us to mitigate data exfiltration risks and ensure clear separation between our higher and lower environments by establishing strong security perimeters,” said BlackLine.

It also outlined how the new investigation workflow changes day-to-day operations for administrators.

“With only the troubleshooting token or unique ID from any VPC-SC violation error message, we can produce a detailed report identifying the principals and target resources involved in a failed API request, and explaining why and how that API request violated BlackLine's service perimeters. We don't need to write a Cloud Logging SQL query to extract the data. The clear access context and actionable insights in the violation details report are an invaluable starting point as we collaborate to resolve violations, significantly reducing our mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) for service perimeter issues, and helping BlackLine maintain our focus on our customers and continue to innovate on their behalf,” said BlackLine.

Operational focus

Google positioned the additions as tools for several stages of perimeter management, not just post-incident analysis. During deployment, teams can use the dashboard in a dry run to see how a planned perimeter would affect traffic before enforcing it in production.

In live environments, the dashboard is intended to support monitoring by giving security operations teams a near real-time view of denials, including what Google described as dynamic agentic access denials. During investigations, the analyser cross-references identity and access management permissions, resource ancestry and context evaluation to show which rule was triggered.

Scoped policies also remain part of the broader VPC Service Controls model, allowing project-level administrators to manage policies closer to the workloads they oversee. The aim is to reduce the burden on central teams while keeping perimeter rules aligned with application changes.

The update reflects a broader push by cloud providers to give customers more native security management tools within their platforms, especially as companies face growing pressure to show tighter control over where sensitive data can move. In practice, the challenge is often less about switching controls on than about understanding why legitimate activity was blocked and how to amend policy without weakening protections.

Google said the new dashboard and analyser are designed to simplify that trade-off by giving security teams a clearer view of blocked activity and the policy decisions behind it.