The rapid evolution of AI is redefining industries, while also exposing organizations to new risks. At Google Cloud, we believe that modern cloud defense should have AI protection built in and accessible by default, delivering native guardrails and controls that are essential to ensuring that security strengthens your AI rollouts. 

To support the next generation of AI innovators, we are making essential AI security and cloud security on by default with a newly enhanced Security Command Center (SCC) Standard tier. This foundational security and compliance management service is now automatically enabled for eligible customers. 

Democratizing AI protection and cloud security 

To ensure your AI projects stay on track, SCC Standard now provides several enhanced capabilities at no cost:

• AI protection democratization: The free Standard tier includes a unified AI protection dashboard, and can detect unprotected Gemini inference, report on large-language model and agent interaction guardrail violations, and offers four baseline AI posture controls.  These capabilities will be generally available by the end of June.

• Upgraded security posture checks: The free security baseline for the Standard tier now offers more than 44 misconfiguration checks based on the Google Cloud Security Essentials (GCSE) compliance framework, 21 more than the previous Standard tier version. SCC Standard now also includes agentless critical vulnerability scanning and graph-driven risk insights to help you prioritize the most critical issues that pose the greatest threat to your organization.

• Data security and compliance: We have added data security posture management (DSPM) to SCC Standard to help teams discover and visualize their data estate across Vertex AI, BigQuery, and Cloud Storage. Compliance Manager is also now included, providing automated monitoring and reporting against the GCSE compliance framework.

• In-context security visibility: SCC now powers new, in-context security findings inside the Cloud Hub dashboard, available in preview. This adds to existing SCC-powered security insights available through the Google Compute Engine (GCE) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) dashboards, giving cloud administrators and infrastructure managers relevant information so they can remediate security issues faster.

Foundational security at your fingertips

At Google Cloud, we believe that foundational AI protection and cloud security should accelerate innovation. Infrastructure administrators and AI developers can instantly view their risk posture and protect their models and agents without leaving their existing workflows.

Check your Cloud Hub, GCE, and GKE security dashboards In Google Cloud to review your security posture. If your team requires advanced threat detection and threat intelligence, virtual red team-based risk analysis, malware scanning, or full-lifecycle AI protection, you can initiate a 30-day free trial of SCC Premium here or directly from your console.

Learn more about Security Command Center at our annual Cloud Next 2026 conference, and register to attend the Built-in defense: The next evolution of Security Command Center for AI-era session on April 23.