GCP Professional Cloud Security Engineer Practice Question

Your company's Cloud Identity structure has an Organization node and separate folders for each business unit. Network engineers need read-only visibility into every project inside their own business unit's folder, while developer groups must only be able to start and stop Compute Engine VM instances within their respective projects. You want a scalable, least-privilege IAM design that minimizes ongoing policy maintenance. What should you do?

Give each business unit's network engineer group the Browser (roles/browser) role on its folder; grant developers the Compute Admin (roles/compute.admin) role on the folder so it cascades to all projects.
Give each business unit's network engineer group the Viewer (roles/viewer) role on the Organization node; grant developers the Compute Instance Admin (roles/compute.instanceAdmin.v1) role on their projects.
Give each business unit's network engineer group the Viewer (roles/viewer) role on its folder; create one custom role containing only compute.instances.start and compute.instances.stop, and grant that role to each project's developer group.
Assign organization-level Viewer to network engineers and a custom start/stop VM role to all developer groups across every project via a single organization-level binding.

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Answer Description

Granting the basic Viewer role on each business-unit folder gives network engineers inherited, read-only access to all projects in their scope without exposing resources in other folders or permitting modifications. Developers need only two permissions-compute.instances.start and compute.instances.stop-so creating one cross-project custom role with exactly those permissions and binding it at the individual project level follows the principle of least privilege. This approach keeps broad but low-risk permissions high in the hierarchy and applies narrowly scoped, task-specific permissions where they are required, while avoiding the overhead of per-resource bindings or excessively permissive predefined roles. Granting Viewer at the organization level would overexpose data, using Browser would not let engineers view all resource details, and assigning high-level roles such as Compute Admin or setting org-wide bindings would violate least-privilege and increase risk.

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