Eliminate Standing and Excess Privileges in Your GKE Environment

Enable Just-in-Time (JIT) and Just-Enough Access (JEA) for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) resources.

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Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is Google Cloud’s managed Kubernetes platform, designed to simplify the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications. GKE automates critical tasks such as cluster provisioning, upgrades, and scaling, while offering native integrations with Google Cloud services for identity, security, observability, and networking. This enables organizations to run Kubernetes workloads reliably and efficiently, without the complexity or operational overhead of managing the underlying infrastructure.

Integration Overview:

Apono helps organizations achieve Zero Standing Privileges (ZSP) by eliminating permanent access to privileged systems, cloud environments, databases, and other critical resources.

Through its integration with GKE, Apono continuously discovers all GKE resources — including clusters, namespaces, secrets, ConfigMaps, deployments, StatefulSets, ingresses, CronJobs, and Jobs — while enabling security teams to enforce granular, dynamic, and context-aware access policies tailored to specific R&D teams and use cases.
For example:

Admin/DevOps Access for temporary elevated privileges for break-glass scenarios or general maintenance.
Developer Access provides mid-tier permissions for everyday tasks, such as deploying applications and troubleshooting within their own namespace.
Support Engineer Access is limited to specific namespaces to retrieve logs, without requiring full cluster visibility.

With just-in-time (JIT) and just-enough-access (JEA) provisioning, access is granted only when needed and automatically revoked, reducing over-privileged accounts, minimizing the attack surface, and maintaining operational agility without compromising security.

Use Cases

JIT and Just Enough Access

Provision real-time access to GKE resources – namespaces, secrets and more.
Ensure right-sized permissions and enforce strict controls on access provisioning.
Minimize unauthorized access risk and reduce the blast radius of security breaches.

Secure Break-glass Access

Grant just-in-time, task-specific access to on-call engineers during incidents.
Scope and revoke access automatically based on context from OnCall and ITSM tools.
Ensure fast, secure incident response while enforcing least-privilege access to your GKE environment.

Risk and Compliance

Achieve Zero Standing Privilege by reducing over-privileged and unused permissions to GKE resources by over 96%.
Protect sensitive data (PII, PHI, PCI) and simplify audits with detailed reporting, anomaly detection, and full access logs.
Meet your customer security demands with granular access controls and full visibility into GKE resource access.

When

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