This week, McKinsey released a report titled “Making a secure transition to the public cloud,” the result of interviews with IT security experts at nearly 100 enterprises around the world. Leveraging the expertise of Google Cloud and McKinsey security experts, the research presents a strategic framework for IT security in cloud and hybrid environments, and provides recommendations on how to migrate to the cloud while keeping security top of mind.

The research shows what many already know: that public cloud adoption is accelerating thanks to increased technical flexibility, simpler scaling, and lower operating costs. What’s exciting is that the research also reveals that many Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) no longer view security as an inhibitor to adoption but instead an opportunity—“In many cases [CISOs] acknowledge that cloud service providers’ security resources dwarf their own,” the authors write—and now these companies are focused on how to best adopt and configure cloud services for increased security.

When implemented properly, public-cloud adoption can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) for IT security.

This requires enterprises, cloud providers, and third-party service providers to work together collaboratively and transparently within a shared security model. Google Cloud has long believed in creating trust through transparency, previously releasing a detailed overview of our infrastructure security, explaining our shared responsibility model, and how we already protect our users and customers at the lower layers of the stack—and we’re thrilled to see McKinsey’s detailed endorsement of the same approach.

Common security approaches, and their tradeoffs.

Every company has different IT needs, but the report found two common security decisions companies take when adopting cloud services: (1) defining the perimeter, and (2) deciding whether to re-architect applications for greater manageability, performance, and security in the cloud (interestingly, only 27% of companies surveyed actually do this—change is hard).

The research identifies three common archetypes for perimeter security: backhauling, cleansheeting, and adopting cloud provider controls by default.





Backhauling allows companies to continue managing IT security on-prem, with an external gateway connecting the data center to the public cloud. Approximately half of the companies surveyed currently use this model, but only 11% plan to continue doing so, since it can keep companies from realizing certain cloud benefits, such as agility.

Cleansheeting requires greater investment and expertise, as it calls for redesigning IT security around a “virtual perimeter” and leveraging multiple cloud-native tools and services.

Using cloud provider controls is the most cost-effective solution, but—depending on the cloud provider—can limit autonomy and may offer limited capabilities.

McKinsey uses these three models, along with the decision to re-architect applications for the cloud, to identify six “archetypes” for cloud security. Each archetype has its own tradeoffs: