Cloud Data Loss Prevention’s Discovery service can help you discover, profile, and monitor sensitive data across your entire organization or just select projects. Google expanded the service to cover BigQuery and BigLake, with more cloud analytics services that manage sensitive data coming later this year. Continuous visibility of where your sensitive data is stored and processed can help inform your organization’s data security, privacy, and governance operations. It can also be leveraged in other security products like Security Command Center and Chronicle to help you prioritize cloud security operations according to risk.

As organizations roll out discovery across their increasingly larger data footprint, cost can emerge as a concern. We want to provide options that deliver acceptable, predictable costs that don’t slow adoption – therefore we’ve introduced a new pricing model, allowing you to choose the option that best fits your needs.

  • On-demand pricing: You pay for the data as it is profiled, giving you flexibility to scale as needed. This default option is a good fit for customers with smaller deployments or wishing to test on a small number of tables. 
  • Subscription pricing: You purchase a dedicated amount of capacity in monthly installments, giving you a fixed cost of your data security without any unpredictable pricing fluctuations.

The default billing option is the on-demand pricing model, as this option is better suited for customers who are just getting started with the product. If you prefer to change, the subscription pricing can offer predictable and consistent costs, regardless of your data growth. You know up front what you are spending: There are no overages or spikes.

Estimating your needed capacity

To help you choose, Cloud DLP’s cost estimator at no cost has been expanded to cover both models. With the estimate you can compare the cost of on-demand vs subscription pricing.

This test image shows estimation of data growth and cost along with options depending on whether you want to classify your entire historical backlog or just recent tables.

Google want to be transparent about what pricing model will offer you the lower cost, that’s why Google included estimation metrics on both models and a graph to help understand when switching models would benefit your organization.

Since on-demand pricing is based on the bytes size of the tables scanned, charges with this mode will adjust up and down based on the amount of data in newly created tables that are profiled or existing tables that are reprofiled. 

If you want more predictable monthly costs, then our capacity subscription option may be a good fit.  The amount of capacity you purchase is determined by the amount of data to profile and how quickly you need results. For example, based on current pricing, if your organization has 30,000 BigQuery tables, purchasing one subscription unit can take approximately three months to completely profile all existing tables. Purchasing three units will completely profile existing tables within about one month. You choose based on what you want. As your business evolves, you can adjust your subscription size as needed.

Cloud DLP’s flexible configuration and pricing options can make sensitive data discovery even more accessible to enterprises of all sizes.