Security teams at agile, fast-growing companies are often tasked with the same mission: ensuring security without slowing down the business. Most teams inherit a technology stack that is optimized for exponential growth, not resilience. In these environments, the security team is a help desk, compliance expert, and incident response team all rolled into one.
To protect your cloud office in this scenario, it’s important to find ways to leverage it. This means identifying strategic control points that maximize resiliency without adding operational overhead.
While Google Workspace provides a good security foundation, native tools have inherent limitations and relying on default configurations can cause problems. To build a truly resilient program, there are some common-sense first steps teams can take to natively secure their Workspaces before intelligently hardening platforms that lack functionality.
Secure Email, Main Attack Vectors, Largest Archives
Email continues to be the most reliable target for attackers, both as an initial attack vector, as a vector to other connected apps and systems, and as a target for sensitive data. Gmail’s default security reliably catches some threats, but it often struggles with targeted threats, advanced social engineering, and payloadless attacks.
Native conservation gap
BEC and targeted spear phishing: Business email compromise (BEC) attacks often do not include malicious links or attachments, instead relying on social engineering to bypass traditional defenses. Environmental context: Google doesn’t know who your VIPs are, what partners you work with, or how often you receive invoices from your vendors, making it difficult to point out subtle anomalies worth investigating. Archiving data at rest: For most companies, email is the largest repository of sensitive data. Once an account is compromised, attackers have access to years of confidential conversations, attachments, contracts, and more.
How to improve Gmail security now
Although Google can’t provide all the features of a modern email security platform, there are steps you can take to make Gmail’s core configuration as secure as possible.
Enable advanced scanning: Get the most from Google by turning on our enhanced pre-delivery message scanning and malware protection. Implement basic email hygiene. Configure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. These protocols are important to prove that the email actually came from you and to prevent domain spoofing. Automate future settings: To stay up-to-date as Google releases additional security updates.[将来の推奨設定を自動的に適用する]Make sure the option is checked.
Manage access beyond authentication
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is the most important control you can implement today, but it’s not a silver bullet. Access control cannot be stopped at the login page.
Too many windows and side doors
Malicious OAuth access: Compromising a token, granting unauthorized consent, a man-in-the-middle attack, or a simple misconfiguration can grant an attacker access that appears perfectly legitimate to security tools. Legacy access: Protocols such as IMAP and POP do not natively support MFA and can allow app password bypass. Detection gap: Google can alert you to suspicious sign-ins, but connecting that signal to other suspicious activity across your environment is a manual and time-consuming process.
Immediately tighten access control
Enforce strong MFA: Not all MFA is created equal. At a minimum, disable SMS or phone calls as MFA authentication methods. Ideally, employ a phishing-resistant method such as a physical security key or Yubikey. Disable legacy protocols: Turn off POP and IMAP access for all users in Gmail settings. Deny OAuth by default: Require users to request access to unconfigured third-party apps instead of allowing access by default.
The next step to proactive, modern security
Properly configured, Google Workspace provides a solid foundation to protect fast-growing companies. But as your company grows, so does your attack surface. For lean security teams who need to maximize efficiency and effectiveness, the end goal is more than just getting the configuration right. It provides visibility across Google Workspace and detection and response capabilities that detect subtle signs of compromise when an account is compromised.
Materials Security is built on Google’s foundation and provides visibility and context that Workspace lacks natively across the emails, files, and accounts in your environment.
Advanced email protection
Material Inbound Protection combines threat investigation and AI, automated user reporting, and custom detection rules to provide multi-layered coverage to catch and remediate advanced threats. Granular automated remediation protects your entire organization from initial detections and user reports, and automatically prioritizes and responds to user-reported phishing.
Materials is also the only platform on the market that protects sensitive email content, automatically detecting, classifying, and securing sensitive emails and attachments behind MFA prompts, protecting critical information even in the event of a breach.
Context-aware account security
A richer set of signals across cloud offices enables Materials to detect and stop account takeovers earlier. Materials monitors all activity across cloud offices, including suspicious logins, anomalous data retrieval patterns and file sharing behavior, password resets, and forwarding rules that violate policies. This allows organizations to gain a comprehensive understanding of risks and threats and take action faster than using native tools alone.
Data discovery and protection
This material fills a gap in Google’s native data protection capabilities. Materials automatically discovers and categorizes sensitive data in Google Drive and enforces file sharing and data access policies without slowing collaboration. Risky shares of sensitive files are flagged, and the system works with each user to self-heal or justify potentially risky shares before revoking risky access and updating labels as necessary.
How secure is your workspace?
Because Google Workspace security spans so many domains, it can be difficult to maintain a complete picture of your posture. As your organization grows and your Workspace evolves, this becomes increasingly difficult. That’s why Materials created the free Google Workspace Security Scorecard.
Whether you’re a security engineer on a small security team struggling to manage your organization’s day-to-day security, a CISO looking to better understand and report on your company’s posture, or an IT leader responsible for managing your workspace, our quick 5-minute assessment not only provides you with a solid baseline, but also provides actionable recommendations to improve your posture.
Check out the Google Workspace self-assessment today and find out where you’re falling short.
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