In the realm of cloud computing, service accounts in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) serve as pivotal components that facilitate secure and automated interactions between applications and GCP services. Unlike user accounts tied to individuals, service accounts are designed for non-human users, enabling applications, virtual machines (VMs), and other services to authenticate and access resources seamlessly. This abstraction ensures that automated processes can operate independently, maintaining security and efficiency.
The Strategic Importance of Service Accounts
Service accounts are not merely technical constructs; they embody strategic elements in cloud architecture. By assigning specific roles and permissions, organizations can enforce the principle of least privilege, ensuring that each application or service has only the necessary access to perform its functions. This granular control mitigates risks associated with over-permissioned accounts and enhances the overall security posture of the cloud environment.
Creating a Service Account: A Step-by-Step Guide
Establishing a service account in GCP involves a series of deliberate steps to ensure proper configuration and alignment with organizational policies:
- Access the Google Cloud Console: Navigate to the console and select the appropriate project from the project selector.
- Navigate to the Service Accounts Page: In the left-hand navigation menu, go to IAM & Admin > Service Accounts.
- Initiate Service Account Creation: Click on the Create Service Account button.
- Configure Service Account Details:
- Service Account Name: Provide a descriptive name that reflects the account’s purpose.
- Service Account ID: This is auto-generated but can be customized.
- Description: Optionally, add a description to provide context.
- Service Account Name: Provide a descriptive name that reflects the account’s purpose.
- Assign Roles to the Service Account: Determine the roles that grant the necessary permissions for the service account’s intended operations.
- Grant Users Access to the Service Account: Specify users or groups that can manage or use the service account.
- Finalize Creation: Review the configurations and click Done to create the service account.
This process ensures that the service account is tailored to specific operational needs while adhering to security best practices.
Best Practices for Managing Service Accounts
Effective management of service accounts is crucial for maintaining a secure and efficient cloud environment. Consider the following best practices:
- Adopt a Single-Purpose Approach: Create dedicated service accounts for individual applications or services to avoid cross-functional access and simplify auditing.
- Implement a Robust Naming Convention: Use consistent and descriptive naming patterns to easily identify the purpose and scope of each service account.
- Regularly Audit and Rotate Keys: Monitor service account keys and rotate them periodically to minimize the risk of unauthorized access.
- Leverage IAM Policies: Utilize Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to define precise access controls and enforce security standards.
- Monitor Service Account Activity: Enable logging and monitoring to track the usage of service accounts and detect any anomalous behavior.
By adhering to these practices, organizations can ensure that service accounts are managed effectively, reducing potential vulnerabilities and enhancing operational integrity.
Integrating Service Accounts into Organizational Workflows
Beyond creation and management, integrating service accounts into broader organizational workflows is essential. This involves aligning service account usage with development pipelines, deployment processes, and operational monitoring. For instance, incorporating service account configurations into infrastructure-as-code templates ensures consistency across environments. Additionally, establishing protocols for service account lifecycle management, including deactivation and deletion, helps maintain a clean and secure cloud environment.
Service accounts in Google Cloud are foundational elements that enable secure, automated interactions between applications and cloud services. By understanding their strategic importance, following best practices for creation and management, and integrating them into organizational workflows, businesses can harness the full potential of GCP while maintaining robust security and operational efficiency.
Advanced Configuration and Identity Management for Google Cloud Service Accounts
Service accounts in Google Cloud Platform extend beyond mere access tools—they represent identities in your cloud’s digital topology. Each service account holds a unique identity that interacts autonomously with GCP services, behaving much like a user account but stripped of the unpredictability of human behavior. This foundational concept transforms service accounts into secure operational nodes that ensure integrity within cloud-native architectures.
In advanced implementations, service account identities become critical when building systems requiring multi-level authentication, inter-service communication, and compartmentalized access control. These identities become the linchpin in both auditability and permission delegation.
The Role of IAM Policies in Advanced Service Account Management
As environments grow in complexity, Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies form the bedrock of maintaining order. IAM is not simply a set of permission switches—it is a philosophy of least privilege, segmentation, and visibility.
Through IAM policies, service accounts can be granted meticulously scoped roles such as roles/compute.instanceAdmin.v1 or roles/storage.objectViewer. These roles serve not just as permission sets, but as philosophical contracts, affirming that only what’s necessary is allowed. In a world increasingly hostile to lax security, this granularity becomes essential.
Administrators can also apply custom roles tailored to unique workflows or compliance requirements. In such cases, each permission becomes a deliberate choice, carving out a narrow corridor of access.
Understanding Key Management and Rotation Protocols
Authentication is only as strong as its weakest link. In the case of service accounts, keys are those links. The use of JSON private key files for authentication can introduce vulnerabilities if mishandled.
GCP offers two primary authentication mechanisms for service accounts:
- User-managed keys (JSON private key files)
- Google-managed keys (automatic rotation)
User-managed keys offer flexibility but carry operational risk. For organizations emphasizing strict compliance or security protocols, rotating these keys regularly is not optional—it’s a mandate. Google Cloud recommends a rotation cadence of every 90 days, although highly sensitive systems might demand more frequent intervals.
In contrast, Google-managed keys abstract key handling from the user, automatically cycling credentials while maintaining service continuity. This method offers peace of mind, especially in production systems where downtime from misconfiguration can be costly.
Leveraging Workload Identity Federation
A standout evolution in GCP service account usage is Workload Identity Federation, a mechanism that allows external workloads to impersonate a Google service account without using service account keys.
This is particularly powerful in hybrid or multi-cloud environments, where workloads from AWS, Azure, or even on-prem systems need secure, keyless access to GCP resources. By using identity pools and providers, one can establish trusted bridges between otherwise siloed identity systems.
Rather than embedding static credentials, applications obtain short-lived tokens from external identity providers (OIDC/SAML), which are then exchanged for Google credentials. This ephemeral model drastically reduces credential leakage risks and aligns with modern zero-trust architectures.
Setting Up Service Account Impersonation
Service account impersonation is a refined security model where a principal (user or another service account) assumes the identity of a service account temporarily. This enables:
- On-demand access elevation without long-term risk
- Contextual auditing of access events
- Flexible delegation of capabilities
For example, a developer with limited permissions could temporarily impersonate a high-privilege service account during a deployment pipeline, ensuring that the elevation is traceable and bounded in time.
To implement impersonation, the calling principal must have the roles/iam.serviceAccountTokenCreator role on the target service account. This structure adds a second layer of control and promotes secure delegation without exposing credentials.
Managing Access with Condition-Based Policies
In increasingly dynamic environments, static access control often falls short. Enter condition-based IAM policies, which offer contextual access control. These policies introduce temporal, geographic, or resource-based logic into access management.
For example:
- Allow a service account to access Cloud Storage only during specific hours.
- Restrict usage of a service account from a particular IP range.
- Deny deletion actions unless under a defined emergency label.
This adaptability is a vital advancement, allowing organizations to integrate environmental awareness into their security posture. Service accounts now operate within intelligent boundaries, not just rulebooks.
Logging and Monitoring Service Account Activity
Observability is non-negotiable when it comes to cloud security. GCP offers powerful logging mechanisms—most notably, Cloud Audit Logs and Cloud Monitoring—to track service account activity.
Each API call made using a service account is logged with:
- Timestamp
- Requester identity
- Resources accessed
- Outcome of the action
This visibility becomes crucial in forensic analysis, compliance reviews, and proactive threat detection. For sensitive service accounts, consider configuring log sinks to export logs to BigQuery for long-term storage and advanced querying, or to Pub/Sub for real-time alerting.
For proactive security, integrate logs with anomaly detection tools or the Security Command Center to raise flags on irregular service account behavior.
Common Pitfalls in Service Account Usage
Despite their robustness, service accounts are often misused. Key missteps include:
- Over-privileging accounts (e.g., granting Editor role)
- Sharing service accounts across services
- Neglecting key rotation and revocation
- Hardcoding credentials in source code
- Failing to monitor usage
Avoiding these errors requires not just technical awareness, but a disciplined culture of security—a shared ethos across engineering, DevOps, and governance teams.
Securing CI/CD Pipelines with Service Accounts
Modern DevOps relies heavily on automation, and service accounts become integral to secure CI/CD workflows. Whether using Cloud Build, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or other tools, service accounts act as the identity layer for machines pushing infrastructure updates or deploying applications.
Best practices include:
- Using separate service accounts per pipeline stage (build, test, deploy)
- Restricting permissions to minimal requirements
- Applying short-lived access scopes through impersonation
- Keeping secrets in Secret Manager rather than version control
By embedding security into the pipeline identity model, organizations mitigate the blast radius of automation gone rogue.
Understanding Cross-Project and Cross-Organization Access
In large enterprises, resources span multiple GCP projects and sometimes multiple organizations. Service accounts must be configured to cross these boundaries securely.
To allow cross-project access:
- Grant IAM roles to the service account on the target project.
- Use proper organizational policies to constrain or approve such access.
For cross-organization scenarios, the security model becomes even more critical. Federation and scoped delegation become essential tools. Here, GCP’s Resource Hierarchy and Organization Policy constraints provide a canvas for sophisticated trust models.
Future-Proofing Service Account Strategy
Cloud environments are in constant flux. What works today may become a vulnerability tomorrow. Forward-looking organizations regularly audit and refactor their service account configurations. Some strategies to future-proof your implementation include:
- Automated policy validation using tools like Forseti Security or Policy Analyzer
- Periodic key usage reviews and pruning of stale accounts
- Embracing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for repeatable and trackable service account management
- Migrating toward passwordless and keyless authentication models
Additionally, remain alert to updates in GCP security features, as Google continuously evolves its platform to address emerging threats and operational complexities.
Advanced service account management is both a science and an art. It demands precise configuration, contextual awareness, and a vision that sees beyond immediate access needs into the broader orchestration of identity and security in the cloud.
By mastering concepts such as workload identity federation, impersonation, condition-based policies, and secure pipeline integration, organizations can achieve a fortified cloud environment where automation and security coexist harmoniously.
Integrating Service Accounts into Scalable Cloud Architectures
When building resilient, enterprise-scale cloud systems, identity must take center stage—not infrastructure, not application logic. At the core of this identity-first paradigm in GCP are service accounts, enabling secure, scoped, and auditable communication across services, APIs, and even external ecosystems.
By designing cloud solutions where every automated process, API request, or container interaction is backed by a uniquely crafted service account, you achieve a granular trust model. This model isn’t just secure, it’s scalable. As systems evolve, permissions and roles can be managed dynamically without disrupting functionality.
The Blueprint for Role Segmentation
In multi-layered cloud solutions, each component—be it a frontend service, data processor, or scheduler—requires distinct capabilities. Using a single, overprivileged service account across all services is not only a security risk but an architectural flaw.
Instead, segment the responsibilities through micro-level service accounts:
- Compute-bound accounts for VM operations or instance startup scripts.
- Storage-restricted accounts for accessing or managing buckets with lifecycle constraints.
- Deployment automation accounts for Terraform, Jenkins, or Cloud Build pipelines.
This role segmentation ensures that a compromise in one service does not lead to cascading failure across the cloud infrastructure. Moreover, it aligns with the tenets of compartmentalization—a timeless strategy in both military defense and modern cybersecurity.
Secure Communication in Microservices Architecture
In containerized or microservice-based deployments, such as those orchestrated by Kubernetes Engine (GKE), internal services often talk to each other via RESTful APIs or messaging queues. Here, workload identity binding offers a secure identity mapping layer, eliminating hardcoded secrets and JSON keys.
By binding Kubernetes service accounts to GCP service accounts, workloads running in pods inherit scoped, identity-based access without direct credential exposure. This design minimizes risks and keeps services modular, secure, and observable.
For instance, a billing microservice might need to write data to BigQuery. By assigning it a specific GCP service account with only roles/bigquery.dataEditor, its access is well-defined and revocable, thereby reducing systemic risk.
Automation Through Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Modern cloud infrastructures thrive on Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform, Deployment Manager, or Pulumi. When provisioning services, defining service accounts and their IAM roles as code embeds security into the fabric of your architecture.
Key best practices include:
- Declaring service account creation with meaningful names and descriptions.
- Managing IAM role bindings via version-controlled templates.
- Automating conditional permissions tied to environment stages (dev, staging, prod).
This not only promotes consistency and repeatability but also aligns with policy-as-code frameworks, where IAM logic is validated through CI pipelines and security gates before deployment.
Data Sovereignty and Regional Compliance
As organizations expand globally, data residency and compliance requirements become non-negotiable. Service accounts serve as tools for enforcing regional boundaries on data access.
By crafting service accounts that are strictly scoped to resources in specific regions—and applying conditional IAM policies that prevent cross-boundary access—you ensure adherence to GDPR, HIPAA, or country-specific regulations.
Moreover, logging access events through region-tagged audit logs allows compliance officers to demonstrate provable controls over cloud resource access—a key asset during audits.
Managing Lifecycle Events at Scale
Service accounts, like any digital identity, have a lifecycle—creation, active use, rotation, suspension, and deletion. Managing this lifecycle at scale requires operational discipline.
A typical lifecycle flow might include:
- Initial provisioning via automation tools.
- Rotation policies for user-managed keys.
- Revocation of anomaly detection.
- Deactivation after project decommissioning.
To avoid operational chaos, it’s crucial to maintain a registry of service accounts—a centralized, queryable inventory tagged by ownership, purpose, and expiration metadata. This allows security teams to review stale or inactive accounts periodically and prune the ecosystem.
Integration with Third-Party Tools and APIs
Many enterprise workflows include third-party SaaS tools—monitoring platforms, CI tools, or data processors. To enable secure access to GCP services without credential sprawl, service accounts become the integration anchors.
Best practices include:
- Creating a dedicated service account per integration, e.g., “[email protected]”
- Assigning only the necessary permissions for API access.
- Using Workload Identity Federation when possible to eliminate key file usage.
- Logging access through these accounts separately for vendor-specific auditing.
This approach ensures that external tools are guests in your ecosystem, not privileged insiders.
Advanced Impersonation in Hierarchical Organizations
Larger organizations often operate with nested folders, projects, and billing accounts. Service accounts offer powerful impersonation strategies in such hierarchies.
Consider a central automation system needing access across multiple projects. Rather than granting it organization-wide permissions, you:
- Assign minimal base permissions.
- Allow impersonation of per-project service accounts with scoped roles.
- Log all impersonation activity under the target account for clearer audit trails.
This impersonation chaining provides secure escalation, role-specific logging, and frictionless automation without bloating any single identity’s privileges.
Scenarios of Privilege Delegation
In practical settings, privilege delegation via service accounts serves many dynamic use cases:
- Incident response tooling might impersonate a high-access service account only during an on-call shift.
- Backup agents might use impersonation only during a defined cron schedule.
- Admin dashboards might allow users to temporarily assume service account identity to perform privileged actions via backends.
This precise delegation provides resilience while avoiding the pitfalls of permanent access grants.
Using Labels and Tags for Management and Discovery
In sprawling environments, discoverability becomes a critical concern. GCP allows tagging service accounts with labels (e.g., environment=prod, owner=analytics-team). When combined with gcloud or Terraform queries, labels help:
- Audit service accounts by function or team.
- Implement cleanup policies.
- Trace ownership during outages or vulnerabilities.
Some organizations extend this practice into custom metadata registries, attaching business unit mappings, sensitivity levels, or lifecycle flags for advanced tracking.
Logging with Contextual Intelligence
Raw logs are valuable, but logs with contextual intelligence are transformative. By correlating service account logs with metadata like IAM role bindings, project membership, and key rotation events, you gain a real-time security dashboard.
Platforms like Chronicle or Splunk can ingest GCP audit logs and overlay them with threat intelligence. A spike in activity from a normally dormant service account, or cross-region data requests from an account used only in India, might trigger anomaly detection alerts, enabling proactive remediation.
Challenges in Service Account Governance
Despite their power, service accounts introduce governance challenges:
- Orphaned accounts post-project closure.
- Shadow admin permissions due to inherited IAM bindings.
- Silent overreach, where an account has more access than observed.
To mitigate these, implement policy scanners—tools that analyze IAM policies against organizational benchmarks. Additionally, a quarterly service account review board can validatethe purpose, access, and activity of critical identities.
Maturity Model for Service Account Usage
As organizations scale, service account management matures through phases:
- Ad-hoc provisioning with basic roles.
- Role-based segmentation with project-level scope.
- Automation integration through IaC and logging.
- Federated access for external systems.
- Policy-driven governance using scanning and enforcement tools.
- Predictive security using anomaly detection and behavioral baselining.
Each phase reflects a leap in both operational sophistication and security resilience.
Service accounts in Google Cloud are far more than credentialed bots, they are the elemental identity constructs of a modern cloud-native enterprise. By integrating them deeply into your architecture—from microservices to third-party bridges, and from compliance frameworks to automation pipelines—you unlock both velocity and safety.
Mastery of service accounts doesn’t just optimize how systems run. It defines how securely, transparently, and responsibly your organization operates in the cloud age.
Fortifying Service Account Security – Real-World Threats and Best Practices for Google Cloud
As organizations increasingly rely on Google Cloud Platform’s service accounts for automation, integration, and secure communication, the attack surface associated with these identities grows. Despite their power and flexibility, misconfigured or poorly managed service accounts can become gateways for attackers, leading to data breaches, privilege escalations, and compliance violations.
This final part of our series dives deep into the common security pitfalls, real-world incidents involving service accounts, and robust defense strategies to safeguard your Google Cloud environment.
Understanding the Threat Landscape Targeting Service Accounts
Service accounts are high-value targets for attackers because they often have broad, programmatic access to critical resources. Unlike human users, these accounts operate without regular interaction, making malicious activities less noticeable.
Key attack vectors include:
- Compromised service account keys: Unauthorized access through leaked or stolen JSON key files.
- Overprivileged accounts: Excessive IAM permissions grant attackers broad capabilities.
- Service account impersonation abuse: Leveraging delegation or impersonation to escalate privileges.
- Misconfigured role bindings: Inadvertently granting rights to public or external identities.
- Inactive or orphaned accounts: Forgotten identities that remain active with access.
Recognizing these risks is the first step toward designing effective defenses.
Case Study: The Cost of a Leaked Service Account Key
In 2019, a well-known cloud security incident revealed how an attacker found a publicly exposed GCP JSON key file on GitHub. Using this key, the attacker gained access to the victim’s cloud resources, launched cryptocurrency mining operations, and incurred thousands of dollars in unexpected costs.
This incident underscored several critical lessons:
- Never commit service account keys to public repositories.
- Enforce automated scanning of code repositories to detect secrets.
- Rotate keys regularly and limit key lifetime.
- Prefer workload identity federation over key files to eliminate secrets.
The financial and reputational damage from such breaches often far exceeds the effort needed to implement these safeguards.
Best Practice: Avoid Long-Lived Service Account Keys
Service account keys that do not expire present a persistent risk. Attackers who gain access to these keys can maintain undetected access indefinitely.
Google Cloud recommends:
- Use short-lived credentials where possible.
- Employ Workload Identity Federation, which allows non-GCP workloads to authenticate without storing service account keys.
- Regularly audit and rotate keys.
- Use Cloud IAM Conditions to restrict when and how keys can be used.
These practices reduce the window of exposure and enhance your cloud security posture.
Detecting and Responding to Suspicious Service Account Activity
Active monitoring of service account usage is crucial. Google Cloud Audit Logs capture detailed information about who used a service account, when, and for what action.
To strengthen detection:
- Integrate audit logs with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms for real-time alerts.
- Set up anomaly detection on usage patterns, such as spikes in API calls or access from unusual IP addresses.
- Enable Cloud Logging insights that flag excessive permissions or inactive accounts suddenly becoming active.
Establishing clear incident response workflows ensures rapid containment and remediation if a compromise is suspected.
Principle of Least Privilege: The Cornerstone of Service Account Security
Granting service accounts only the permissions they absolutely need is fundamental. Overprivileged accounts are a prime cause of many cloud breaches.
How to enforce least privilege:
- Define granular custom IAM roles rather than broad predefined roles.
- Use role separation—assign different roles for different operations, never a single all-powerful account.
- Regularly conduct permission audits to identify and revoke unnecessary access.
- Use IAM policy analyzer tools to visualize permission inheritance and spot excessive access.
This discipline reduces the blast radius if a service account is compromised.
Managing Service Account Keys Securely
If key files must be used, their management should follow strict security protocols:
- Store keys in secure vault hardware security modules.
- Encrypt keys at rest and in transit.
- Limit key access to automated systems only.
- Log and audit all key usage events.
- Remove unused keys immediately.
By treating service account keys as highly sensitive secrets, you mitigate the risk of accidental exposure.
Mitigating Risks with Workload Identity Federation
Workload Identity Federation allows applications running outside GCP to access Google Cloud resources without needing long-lived service account keys.
Benefits include:
- Eliminating JSON key files from your environment.
- Using trusted external identity providers (like AWS, Azure, or on-premise systems) to assert identity.
- Applying conditional access policies dynamically.
- Simplifying credential management at scale.
Implementing federation reduces secret sprawl and improves compliance with security frameworks.
Service Account Impersonation and Delegation Controls
While impersonation is a powerful feature, it also opens potential attack paths if not tightly controlled.
Best practices include:
- Restrict which identities can impersonate a service account using IAM conditions.
- Monitor and log all impersonation events.
- Use time-bound access tokens for temporary delegation.
- Apply multi-factor authentication (MFA) where possible to elevate sensitive operations.
Properly controlled impersonation enables flexible automation without compromising security.
Automating Security with Infrastructure as Code Policies
Embed security controls into your IaC templates to enforce consistency and reduce human error:
- Define service accounts with explicit least-privilege roles.
- Use tools like Terraform Sentinel or Open Policy Agent (OPA) to enforce policy compliance pre-deployment.
- Automate key rotation and disablement procedures.
- Version-control all access configurations for auditability.
Automation not only accelerates deployment but also ensures guardrails remain intact as infrastructure evolves.
Regularly Review and Revoke Orphaned Service Accounts
Orphaned accounts—those left active after project decommissioning or employee departure—are invisible risks.
Recommendations:
- Maintain an up-to-date inventory of service accounts.
- Schedule quarterly reviews to identify inactive or unused accounts.
- Revoke permissions or delete accounts that are no longer needed.
- Use audit logs to verify no active usage before deletion.
Cleaning up orphaned accounts reduces potential entry points for attackers.
Implementing Conditional Access and Context-Aware Security
Google Cloud IAM Conditions enable context-aware access, such as restricting service account usage by:
- Source IP address ranges.
- Device security posture.
- Time of day or geographic location.
Applying conditional policies for service accounts tightens security without sacrificing operational flexibility.
Educating Teams on Service Account Security Awareness
Human error is a common factor in security incidents. Raising awareness about the importance of service account hygiene among developers and DevOps teams is critical.
Training should cover:
- Risks of exposing keys in code or logs.
- Proper usage and storage of service account credentials.
- How to request minimal permissions.
- Reporting suspicious activities.
Cultivating a security-first culture is a foundational defense.
Leveraging Google Cloud Security Command Center
The Google Cloud Security Command Center (SCC) aggregates security data and provides insights into misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, including those related to service accounts.
Use SCC to:
- Scan for overprivileged service accounts.
- Identify exposed keys or credentials.
- Detect anomalous usage patterns.
- Prioritize remediation efforts based on risk scores.
Integrating SCC into your cloud operations enhances visibility and reduces time to detect threats.
Handling Incidents Involving Service Accounts
When a breach involving a service account occurs, a rapid and coordinated response is essential:
- Immediately disable or delete compromised keys/accounts.
- Review audit logs to assess impact and attack vectors.
- Rotate credentials and update access policies.
- Notify stakeholders and conduct a post-incident review.
- Implement lessons learned to prevent recurrence.
Proactive incident playbooks and rehearsals improve organizational readiness.
Future-Proofing Service Account Security
As cloud technologies evolve, so do the tools and techniques for securing identities:
- Adopt zero-trust security models that continuously validate identities.
- Explore automated threat detection powered by AI to identify subtle anomalies.
- Use federated identity standards to unify multi-cloud and hybrid access.
- Engage in community best practices and threat intelligence sharing.
Staying ahead requires continuous learning and adapting.
Conclusion
Service accounts are indispensable but sensitive components of Google Cloud architectures. Their misuse or compromise can lead to severe security incidents.
To fortify your service account security:
- Embrace the principle of least privilege relentlessly.
- Prefer short-lived credentials and federation over long-lived keys.
- Automate permission and key management through IaC.
- Monitor usage actively and set up anomaly detection.
- Educate your teams on risks and best practices.
- Regularly review, audit, and prune service accounts.
- Utilize Google Cloud native tools like Security Command Center.
- Implement conditional and context-aware access policies.
- Prepare robust incident response plans.
By following these principles and strategies, your organization can leverage the power of service accounts confidently, unlocking cloud agility without sacrificing security.
