Google Cloud Professional Cloud Security Engineer Practice Exam

Enforcing egress traffic restrictions at the folder level in Google Cloud can be effectively implemented by enabling Cloud NAT (Network Address Translation) for the designated Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and restricting target ranges.

Cloud NAT allows instances in a private network to access the internet while preventing unsolicited inbound connections, thus offering a way to control egress traffic without having external IP addresses assigned to the resources. By configuring target ranges, you can control and restrict the external IP addresses that your services can communicate with, effectively controlling which egress connections are permitted.

This approach is ideal for maintaining security and ensuring compliance with organizational policies, as it allows for centralized management of egress traffic rules that apply to multiple projects or resources under a specific folder. It also allows for scalability since you can manage egress traffic from a centralized point without adjusting the settings on every VM individually or managing firewall rules in multiple projects, thus simplifying the deployment and management process.

Utilizing options such as adjusting network properties of individual VMs or enabling firewall rules project by project would require more granular management and could lead to misconfigurations, while Cloud Armor is better suited for application-layer security rather than directly controlling egress traffic at the folder level.