Google Cloud Professional Cloud Security Engineer Practice Exam

The purpose of configuring an Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) in Google Cloud is to enforce authentication and authorization for your applications and systems. IAP serves as a security layer that helps verify the identity of users that are attempting to access your applications hosted on Google Cloud. It ensures that only authenticated users with the required permissions can access specific resources, ultimately allowing organizations to manage user access in a granular manner.

With IAP, you can set policies that govern who can view or interact with your applications based on their identity and the context of their access request. This protection is essential for safeguarding sensitive data and maintaining compliance with security policies, as it adds a robust mechanism for identity verification and resource access management.

Other options such as optimizing load balancing, reducing network latency, or monitoring VM performance relate to different functionalities and services within Google Cloud but do not pertain to the primary role of IAP in providing security through identity management.