5 Key Google G Suite Updates Partners Need To Know

Locking Down G Suite

Google updated G Suite Tuesday with tools, integration and capabilities intended to give users of the popular cloud-based office productivity suite more secure options for protecting their enterprise data.

G Suite, formerly known as Google Apps, was the pioneering product in its category, offering Docs, Sheets, Gmail, Drive and more for businesses. Over the years, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company has built into the platform a number of security features for safeguarding data and managing who accesses devices and systems.

The latest features enable greater control over authenticating users, integrating with other products and analyzing log data.

The new G Suite Enterprise Edition, which includes the security updates, "is designed to provide the peace of mind our enterprise customers demand and deserve," blogged Reena Nadkarni, a product manager for G Suite.

Keys Please

Google has long offered two-step verification to securely identify users logging into their G Suite accounts, with the choice to use a Security Key as a second authentication factor.

The latest G Suite release allows IT administrators to restrict access exclusively to users that have the physical implement that plugs directly into the user's laptop or pairs with a device through Bluetooth or Near Field Communication, in lieu of having a code texted to their phones.

Security Keys offer more security against phishing and other common attacks.

Protect Data On Drive

Google extended the data loss prevention (DLP) tools it has offered Gmail users for a couple of years now to its storage product, Google Drive.

Google's DLP allows users to easily establish governance rules and offers OCR recognition of text content in images.

Those capabilities integrated with Google Drive will make it easier to secure sensitive data, control content on the cloud storage service, and guard against accidental sharing of confidential information with external sources, according to Google.

Bring Your Own Certificate To Gmail

To further safeguard data contained in email, G Suite now allows users to bring their own S/MIME encryption certificates to Gmail.

Google's cloud-based email service is a highly secure platform with dozens of security and authentication measures built in. But users might be exchanging email with other services that aren't as stringent in protecting their users. Allowing administrators to enforce S/MIME usage adds another layer of protection, according to Google.

BigQuery On Gmail

Google has made it easier to gain insight from the logs generated in Gmail with a pre-configured BigQuery integration.

BigQuery, Google's enterprise data warehouse, can churn through log data to help administrators diagnose problems. The integration will enable them to run custom queries, analyze large amounts of data and build custom dashboards, according to Google.

Email Archiving Integration

Not all Google customers use Google Vault for archiving their email. Some prefer third-party SMTP archiving solutions like HP Autonomy or Veritas. So Google has made it easier to integrate those products with Gmail.