When it comes to building technology solutions, a few topics carry more weight than security. Whether your services are running in on-premises servers or in a public cloud, chances are you want to limit the risk you expose yourself and your customers to. A key strategy to minimizing security risks is applying the principle of least privilege to the design of your systems. By limiting the abilities of a given user or system component to only those abilities they absolutely need, we can make any associated attack surface as small as possible. This is true both for malicious intent as well as simple human error. Google Cloud Platform facilitates the principle of least privilege via a powerful permission system: Cloud Identity and Access Management.