Sensitive Data Protection | Google Cloud

archived 16 Apr 2026 07:06:03 UTC

Sensitive Data Protection

Discover and protect your sensitive data

A fully managed service designed to help you discover, classify, and protect your valuable data assets with ease.
Try our discovery service for BigQuery by scanning and profiling a single table of your choice.
Features

Automated sensitive data discovery and classification

Continuously monitor your data assets across your entire organization, select organization folders, or individual projects. Powerful and easy-to-use UI available in the cloud console. Use data asset profiles to inform your security, privacy, and compliance posture. Choose from 200+ predefined detectors or add your own custom types, adjust detection thresholds, and create detection rules to fit your needs and reduce noise.

Sensitive data intelligence for security assessments

Sensitive Data Protection is deeply integrated into the Security Command Center Enterprise risk engine. This powerful combination continuously monitors your data, pinpoints your high-value assets, analyzes vulnerabilities, and simulates real-world attack scenarios. With this intelligence, you can proactively address security, posture, and threat risks and safeguard the data that drives your business.

Powerful and flexible protection for your AI/ML workloads

Sensitive Data Protection provides tools to classify and de-identify sensitive elements or unwanted content within your data. This fine-grained data minimization can help you prepare data for AI model training or tuning and protect at run time in workloads like chat, data collection, data display, and generative AI prompts and responses to ensure you adhere to regulations and internal policies.

De-identification, masking, tokenization, and bucketing

Sensitive Data Protection helps you take a data-centric approach to securing your assets. De-identification enables you to transform your data to reduce data risk while retaining data utility. Additionally, you can use insights to apply column-level, fine-grained access, or dynamic masking policies.

Cover use cases anywhere, on or off cloud with the DLP API

Cloud Data Loss Prevention and the DLP API are part of Sensitive Data Protection. Use the DLP API’s built-in support for various Google Cloud services. Additionally, the DLP API’s in-line content methods enable support for additional data sources, custom workloads, and applications on or off cloud.
Options table
Service typeDescriptionSuggested use
Sensitive data discovery
Used to discover, scan, and classify across a wide set of data
Monitoring for sensitive data across a large set of assets, such as your entire data warehouse
Storage inspection
Targeted, focused inspection to help you find every data element in Google Cloud storage systems
Investigations or dealing with high-value unstructured data like chat logs stored in Google Cloud
Hybrid inspection
Targeted, focused inspection to help you find every data element in storage systems outside Google Cloud
Investigations or dealing with high-value unstructured data like chat logs stored outside Google Cloud
Content inspection
Synchronous, stateless inspection on data from anywhere
Inspecting in near real time or integrating into custom workloads, applications, or pipelines 
Content de-identification
Synchronous, stateless transformation on data from anywhere
Masking, tokenizing, de-identifying in near real time or integrating into custom workloads, applications, or pipelines
Learn more about sensitive data discovery.
Sensitive data discovery
Description
Used to discover, scan, and classify across a wide set of data
Suggested use
Monitoring for sensitive data across a large set of assets, such as your entire data warehouse
Storage inspection
Description
Targeted, focused inspection to help you find every data element in Google Cloud storage systems
Suggested use
Investigations or dealing with high-value unstructured data like chat logs stored in Google Cloud
Hybrid inspection
Description
Targeted, focused inspection to help you find every data element in storage systems outside Google Cloud
Suggested use
Investigations or dealing with high-value unstructured data like chat logs stored outside Google Cloud
Content inspection
Description
Synchronous, stateless inspection on data from anywhere
Suggested use
Inspecting in near real time or integrating into custom workloads, applications, or pipelines 
Content de-identification
Description
Synchronous, stateless transformation on data from anywhere
Suggested use
Masking, tokenizing, de-identifying in near real time or integrating into custom workloads, applications, or pipelines
Learn more about sensitive data discovery.
How It Works

To use Sensitive Data Protection, you use one of its services, such as discovery, to scan your data for sensitive elements. You can enable post-scan actions, including alerting and automatic publishing to systems like Chronicle, Security Command Center, and Pub/Sub.

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Common Uses

Gain awareness of your sensitive data

Discovery: Continuous visibility into your sensitive data
Understand and manage your data risk across your organization. Continuous data monitoring across your organization can help you make more informed decisions, manage and reduce your data risk, and stay in compliance. With no jobs or overhead to manage, you can focus on the outcomes and your business.
Discovery
Discovery

Investigate your storage

Deep inspection of structured and unstructured data
Inspect your data in storage systems exhaustively and investigate individual findings.
Person Thinking

Understand sensitive anomalies

Privacy risk analysis of your data
Assess data for privacy and re-identification risk. Risk analyses can help you see how the size, shape, and distribution of data can increase re-identification risk.
Graph

Automate de-identification

De-identification of structured and unstructured data
Create de-identified copies of Cloud Storage data. De-identify Cloud Storage objects, folders, and buckets without needing to run your own pipeline or custom code.
Persons running

    Advanced masking and de-identification

    Run classification and de-identification in a BigQuery UDF
    De-identify data while querying using a remote function. Inspect, de-identify, and tokenize BigQuery data from real-time query results to reduce exposure of sensitive data.
    Man Thinking

      De-identify: Redact and tokenize data

      Protect sensitive data as you migrate to the cloud
      Unblock more workloads as you migrate to the cloud. Sensitive Data Protection helps you inspect and classify your sensitive data in structured and unstructured workloads. De-identification techniques like tokenization (pseudonymization) let you preserve the utility of your data for joining or analytics, while reducing the risk of handling the data, by obfuscating the raw sensitive identifiers.
      de-identification

      Protect high-value AI and ML workloads

      Prepare data for model training
      Find and remove sensitive elements from your data before model training. Tailor this to your business needs with full control over the data types to remove or keep. 
      data redaction

      Redact sensitive data elements in chat

      Classify and redact in Dialogflow CX
      Redact sensitive data from unstructured chat logs. Leverage the power of our inspection and de-identification engine to remove sensitive data from your Dialogflow (Contact Center AI) admin logs.
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        What you'll get:
        Step-by-step guide
        Reference architecture
        Available pre-built solutions
        This service was built with Vertex AI. You must be 18 or older to use it. Do not enter sensitive, confidential, or personal info.
        Pricing
        How our pricing worksDiscovery is billed based on the pricing mode you select. Inspection and transformation pricing is based on total bytes processed.
        Category or typeDescriptionPrice USD
        Discovery
        Consumption mode
        $0.03/GB
        Fixed-rate subscription mode
        A default discovery subscription is included at no charge with the purchase of a Security Command Center Enterprise subscription.
        $2500/unit
        Inspection and transformation
        Up to 1 GB
        Free
        Inspection of Google Cloud storage systems
        Starting at
        $1/GB
        Lower with volume
        Inspection of data from any source (hybrid inspection)
        Starting at
        $3/GB
        Lower with volume
        In-line content inspection
        Starting at
        $3/GB
        Lower with volume
        In-line content de-identification
        Starting at
        $2/GB
        Lower with volume
        Risk analysis
        Analyze sensitive data to find properties that might increase the risk of subjects being identified
        No Sensitive Data Protection charges* 
        Risk analysis uses resources in BigQuery; charges appear as BigQuery usage
        Learn more about Sensitive Data Protection pricing.
        How our pricing works
        Discovery is billed based on the pricing mode you select. Inspection and transformation pricing is based on total bytes processed.
        Discovery
        Description
        Consumption mode
        Price USD
        $0.03/GB
        Fixed-rate subscription mode
        A default discovery subscription is included at no charge with the purchase of a Security Command Center Enterprise subscription.
        Description
        $2500/unit
        Inspection and transformation
        Description
        Up to 1 GB
        Price USD
        Free
        Inspection of Google Cloud storage systems
        Description
        Starting at
        $1/GB
        Lower with volume
        Inspection of data from any source (hybrid inspection)
        Description
        Starting at
        $3/GB
        Lower with volume
        In-line content inspection
        Description
        Starting at
        $3/GB
        Lower with volume
        In-line content de-identification
        Description
        Starting at
        $2/GB
        Lower with volume
        Risk analysis
        Description
        Analyze sensitive data to find properties that might increase the risk of subjects being identified
        Price USD
        No Sensitive Data Protection charges* 
        Risk analysis uses resources in BigQuery; charges appear as BigQuery usage
        Learn more about Sensitive Data Protection pricing.

        Pricing Calculator

        Estimate your monthly costs.

        Custom Quote

        Connect with our sales team to get a custom quote for your organization.

        Start your proof of concept

        New customers get $300 in free credits.

        See Sensitive Data Protection in action.

        Sensitive data discovery for your data warehouse

        De-identify sensitive data stored in Cloud Storage

        Try our classification engine for yourself

        Business Case
        Explore how other businesses cut costs, increase ROI, and drive innovation with Sensitive Data Protection
        Security
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