Google Workspace Security Features for Data Leak Prevention

Public cloud security can be a very complex issue to address for organizations today. However, having the tooling and capabilities needed to both have the visibility to cybersecurity events and address these properly provides tremendous advantages for organizations utilizing public cloud resources. Google Workspace environment can be a powerful and robust platform for organizations today to be able to house business-critical resources and services for core daily operations. However, organizations must keep pace and maintain a proactive stance with all pertinent areas of protecting data and cybersecurity in general.

Google Workspace organizations making use of Spinbackup API-based CASB for Data Loss, Data Leak, and Cybersecurity Protection have a major leg up on protecting organization data. Recently, new features have been added to help Google Workspace administrators to have even better visibility to cybersecurity events, managing incidents in the Google Workspace (G Suite) environment, and also to objects that are shared outside of the Google Workspace organization. Let’s take a look at the core Spinbackup features, and then see how the new “plug into” the existing Spinbackup framework for Google Workspace (former G Suite) environments.

Google Workspace Security Features for Data Leak and Data Loss Prevention

Spinbackup’s Data Loss and Google Workspace Data Leak prevention as well as the Google Workspace security features, help organizations stay in the driver’s seat of knowing at all times what is going on with Google Workspace organization data. It allows organizations to cover the important areas of making sure data is both backed up as well as protected from exposure to unauthorized access either intentionally or accidentally. Spinbackup provides a unified interface and management plane to access all the features that are needed when protecting G Suite environments.

Google Workspace (G Suite) administrators do not have to login to disjointed products or interfaces to administer these protective and cybersecurity features. They are all available together, uniformly in the Spinbackup dashboard interface. Before introducing the new features recently integrated within Spinbackup, let’s cover the core functionality that Spinbackup provides to organizations. These include:

• Data Loss Prevention
• Data Leak Prevention
• Google Workspace Ransomware Protection
• Insider Threats Detection
• Risky Third-party Apps Control
• Sensitive Data Control
• And everything else to decrease Google Workspace security risks

Let’s take a brief overview of the functionality of these core modules and how they work together to provide a unified, comprehensive, and powerful protective solution for organizations utilizing Google Workspace environments.

Data Loss Prevention

Protecting Data in the cloud is extremely important! Never let yourself or your organization fall under the erroneous thinking that public cloud data is protected from any type of data disaster. This is simply not true. Public cloud infrastructure such as powers Google’s G Suite environment are impressively powerful, robust, and resilient. This does not mean that data cannot be unexpectedly deleted or otherwise corrupted by accidental/intentional deletion, or corruption from ransomware.

Spinbackup Data Loss Protection provides a layer of data security and protection for data by providing automatic daily backups of data, multiple restore points, restore in “time machine” functionality, and a “lost and found” area for deleted items. Google Workspace administrators can configure automated daily backups for up to three times daily. Backups are stored securely and encrypted in flight and at rest with powerful AES-256 encryption.

With only a few clicks G Suite administrators are able to completely recovery single files or folders or an entire set of data to the original user account or decide to migrate the data during the restore to target a different G Suite user account.

Data Leak Prevention

Equally important today for organizations doing business in the public cloud is Data Leak Protection. All too often you hear of businesses on the news making headlines for leaking sensitive data of its customers. This is not the kind of headlines that organizations want to be making with their businesses. Data leak can come in many forms. It can happen inadvertently such as when an employee accidentally emails out a list of sensitive information such as credit card numbers of customers. An unscrupulous employee could intentionally attempt to transfer sensitive data outside the organization. Also, malicious or risky third-party apps could gain access to data they should not have access to. All of these scenarios and many others can put organization data at risk.

Spinbackup’s Data Leak Protection involves powerful machine learning enabled protection that is proactive in its approach. The machine learning algorithms parse through the overwhelming amounts of activity information that may be generated from larger Google Workspace environments and is able to very accurately identity activity that is an attempted leak of data or other cybersecurity concerns. The Data Leak Protection provided by Spinbackup alerts to:

• Suspicious downloads of data
• Data transferred between the Google Workspace cloud and a personal cloud environment
• Google Workspace environment data downloaded to the local hard drive
• Shared data outside the organization
• Data being access by potentially risky third-party applications

By alerting Google Workspace (G Suite) administrators to potentially dangerous exposure to sensitive or G Suite data in general, G Suite administrators have the visibility they need to proactively remediate the exposure to Google Workspace (G Suite) data. Spinbackup provides automated responses as well that can provide configurable thresholds to alleviate data leak dangers.

Cloud Ransomware Protection

Google Workspace Ransomware is a major concern for organizations today. Silently and stealthily, ransomware crawls through business-critical data, encrypting data undetected until the damage is already done. Public cloud environments are not immune to the effects of ransomware. In fact, more and more, attackers are focusing their efforts and attention on public cloud environments such as G Suite since more businesses are housing important data and services in the cloud.

Spinbackup’s Google Workspace (G Suite) ransomware detection mechanism utilizes the same powerful machine learning to identify possible ransomware infections attempting to encrypt data. Once identified, the ransomware process is blocked and files that have been affected are automatically restored from the latest backup. Organizations today must protect themselves from the dangers of ransomware or risk losing valuable data and having to pay ransom costs to unlock encrypted data.

Insider Threats Detection

All too often, organizations focus on the threats that exist on the outside, but neglect to focus any attention on threats that may exist on the inside. The Spinbackup Insider Threats Detection functionality provides functionality to quickly identify possible threats coming from the inside of the organization. After forming a baseline of normal user activity, the intelligent learning abilities that Spinbackup provides, allows it to effectivity recognize anomalies in “normal” user activity. This includes:

Abnormal logins

• Including failed login attempts
• Abnormal login locations

Abnormal data downloads

• Downloading data to personal storage
• Downloaded data or copying data from Google Workspace to other personal cloud storage

Installation of risky third-party applications

• Approving permissions to applications to have access to Google Workspace storage

By intelligently recognizing abnormal user activity, Spinbackup takes a tremendous load from Google Workspace administrators with the machine learning enabled approach to recognizing abnormal activity patterns. All of the activity is logged in the Domain audit dashboard and proactive alerts are triggered by specified events.

Risky Third-Party Apps Control

Google Workspace (former G Suite) provides access to literally thousands of third party applications that extend the default G Suite features and functionality set to organizations and provide added business value to the overall solution. However, with this added extensibility, there is a danger with risky third-party applications that may be granted access to sensitive Google Workspace data.

Spinbackup provides Google Workspace administrators an effective solution to the risky third-party apps problem by third-party apps control module. The third-party apps control module allows:

• Analysis of the risky third-party app
• Machine learning-based profile of the app and its intentions
• Listing of the permissions the app currently has
• Google Workspace users who are using the application
• Devices with the app installed
• App “blacklisting

Spinbackup effectively provides visibility to the permissions the third-party apps in the environment currently have and can automatically revoke those permissions when third-party apps exhibit risky behavior.

Sensitive Data Control

While falling under the general Data Leak Protection capabilities of Spinbackup, the sensitive data control provides specialized data leak protection capabilities to Google Workspace administrators. Making sure that all types of deemed sensitive data does not leave the Google Workspace organization is vital for organizations to stay in business and out of the headlines.

By default, Spinbackup is configured to prevent leaking credit card numbers if organizations choose to turn on this protection. Additionally, Spinbackup provides customizable data leak protection for matching patterns for data that organizations deem to be sensitive in their environments and do not want to leave the boundaries of the Google Workspace organization

Aggregated Reports/Daily Google Workspace Security Reports

One of the many advantages of Spinbackup protecting your Google Workspace organization is ability to stay informed and alerted concerning pertinent cybersecurity events, activities or other notable events occur. The new Aggregated Reports feature found in the Security settings of the Spinbackup Dashboard allows Google Workspace administrators to flag on the creation and daily emailing of security events that have occurred in the Google Workspace (G Suite) organization. These are basically a security digest with pertinent hyperlinks for the security events that take G Suite administrators to the applicable Spinbackup dashboard to further investigate the incident.

The resulting email notification will show the events listed by:

• Policy: Rule Type
• Rule Name
• Incidents

Incident Feedback

The Spinbackup solution provides an intelligent machine learning based CASB to Google Workspace organizations that has a very low ratio of false positives and continually gets smarter as the system profiles security and other user related activities. With the new Incident Feedback enhancement, Google Workspace administrators are able to provide feedback on whether the security incident was correctly identified by Spinbackup, triage the decision of the incident, and see the history of changes in the status of the security incident.

Shared Objects Improvement

A great new enhancement to the data leak protection functionality of Spinbackup allows Google Workspace administrators to see all files that are shared in the domain. Previously, a file that was shared had to match a protection rule in order for the Google Workspace administrator to have visibility to the file share and the rules for shared objects. Now in the Data Audit dashboard, Google Workspace administrators can see all files that are shared both inside and outside the Google Workspace organization with three simple clicks. Having this level of visibility gives G Suite administrators the upper hand in preventing data leak disasters.

Concluding Thoughts

Spinbackup’s machine learning-based CASB solution certainly gives Google Workspace administrators the tools, defensive and offensive, that they need to fight against data loss, data leak, and cybersecurity threats. The core Spinbackup solution covers the concerns that organizations need to view as crucial in today’s cybersecurity hostile world and to follow the best Google Workspace security practices. Spinbackup is a good solution to help with Google Workspace Admin tasks.