Google Workspace Bolsters Data Security by Adding Client-Side Encryption to Gmail and Calendar
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Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on the Google Workspace blog.
We consistently hear from our customers that the privacy of their data is top of mind, which is why we’ve built state-of-the-art security and privacy-preserving technologies into our products — to keep customer data private and secure. We’ve put Google AI to work on behalf of our customers to automatically stop the majority of online threats before they emerge. Gmail, for example, automatically blocks more than 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware. These defenses, together with our unique encryption capabilities like client-side encryption (CSE), help our customers such as Groupe Le Monde, PwC, and Verizon, meet their security, privacy, compliance, and digital sovereignty requirements.
Last year, we enabled CSE for Drive, Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Meet, and today we’re excited to share that CSE is generally available for Gmail and Calendar, enabling even more organizations to become arbiters of their own data and the sole party deciding who has access to it. We recognize sovereign controls are important to customers and have accelerated delivery of these encryption capabilities to support our customers in maintaining control over their data and meeting their regulatory compliance needs.
Guarantee complete control of your data for the most challenging regulations
The expansion of CSE capabilities across Google Workspace helps to significantly reduce the burden of compliance for enterprises and public sector organizations. It gives organizations higher confidence that any third party, including Google and foreign governments, cannot access their confidential data. Workspace already encrypts data at rest and in transit by using secure-by-design cryptographic libraries. Client-side encryption takes this encryption capability to the next level by ensuring that customers have sole control over their encryption keys — and thus complete control over all access to their data. Starting today, users can send and receive emails or create meeting events with internal colleagues and external parties, knowing that their sensitive data (including inline images and attachments) has been encrypted before it reaches Google servers.
Users can continue to collaborate across other essential apps in Google Workspace while IT and security teams can ensure that sensitive data stays compliant with regulations. As customers retain control over the encryption keys and the identity management service to access those keys, sensitive data is indecipherable to Google and other external entities.
One key use case for CSE in this context centers on helping organizations subject to regulatory requirements, such as PwC, remain compliant, by meeting the need for the highest levels of encryption for certain types of communication.
“We have been searching for the capability to guarantee that our encrypted communications remain inaccessible to third-parties, including our technology providers, for some time. Google appears to be uniquely positioned with client-side encryption in providing us with complete control over our sensitive data, ensuring that we remain compliant as an organization in the ever changing world of data regulation. These features now being available across Google Workspace represent a pivotal moment for us. We’re enthusiastic about the ability to continue to benefit from the efficiency in working that Workspace provides us with, whilst at the same time maintaining trust with our customers that their confidential data will stay private and compliant,” said Shaun Bookham, UK Operations & Technology Director at PwC.
One of our global telecommunications customers, Verizon, is leveraging CSE to gain complete control over their sensitive data, ensuring that they remain compliant as an organization while supporting customers in highly regulated industries. This opens doors for the company to deliver an exceptional experience for its customers, by extending the level of data protection and privacy to their clients.
“At Verizon, we adhere to governance requirements related to access of our sensitive data while also providing the best experience coupled with deep trust. We have worked alongside Google to develop new encryption solutions and are excited to explore their utilization,” said Russell Leader, Director Collaboration and Mobility at Verizon.
Protecting an organization’s most important assets
The regulatory requirements for separation between an organization’s data and their cloud provider’s environment has resulted in important use cases for client-side encryption — from keeping sensitive R&D data extremely private, even from an organization’s SaaS provider, to scenarios where confidentiality is paramount to the success or failure of a mission-critical operation.
Customers, such as media giant Groupe Le Monde, rely on client-side encryption to protect their most crucial assets. By leveraging client-side encryption across Workspace, Groupe Le Monde can be assured that their communications, appointments, and files will not be subject to leaks, thus helping to keep their journalists safe.
“Client-side encryption gives us the next level of privacy, to ensure integrity within the journalistic process. This allows us to guarantee a higher level of security for our journalists, and to protect our sensitive content,” said Sacha Morard, Chief Technology Officer at Groupe Le Monde.
Another industry-leading Google Workspace enterprise customer uses client-side encryption to protect their most sensitive projects. For these projects, the customer is the sole owner of their encryption keys, thereby protecting their critical intellectual property and maintaining their data sovereignty requirements.
While each customer’s digital transformation journey is different, with all essential Google Workspace apps now being covered by CSE, companies of all sizes in all industries can benefit from these protections.
Starting today, client-side encryption is available globally to customers with Workspace Enterprise Plus, Education Standard, and Education Plus. To learn more about client-side encryption and how to get started today, watch our presentation from Google Cloud Next ’22 and check out the documentation.
BHI: Embracing Google Workspace and AppSheet to transform the workplace
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In the last two decades, BHI, once a small construction company in Vernal, Utah, has expanded its operations to dozens of industries in over 25 states. But while the company grew, its technology trailed behind. File sharing and emails both ran off a single server. Editing a document was a grueling undertaking that required an employee to VPN in, patiently download the file, edit it, then upload it again—all from a job site with a limited internet connection. Acknowledging the need for better technology, BHI adopted Google Workspace and AppSheet and transformed its business to be more innovative, productive, and profitable.
Rebuilding collaboration and productivity
BHI first looked to replace its archaic email and file-sharing systems. They found that Google Workspace—as a proven and popular collaboration solution for remote teams and a familiar, preferred platform that most employees use in their personal lives—was the clear choice. BHI migrated its 500 employees to Google Workspace in less than a week. Productivity immediately soared, since employees could collaborate more easily with Google Workspace’s products and access them from any device, from anywhere—even at the construction sites.
For instance, the contract writing process drastically improved with Google Workspace. Version control had always been a struggle—as employees circulated a draft contract from one computer to the next, versions became unruly and randomized, untracked changes popped up, and files went missing. With Google Workspace, the pre-construction, legal, and finance teams can all edit and track changes of a contract from wherever they work. Version control has become a thing of the past, as everyone is always working on the latest version.
By adopting Google Workspace, BHI decentralized its operations and began collaborating in real time across over 150 job sites. Management and IT gained new insights into challenges that they may never have uncovered nor confronted without a cloud-based productivity tool. The IT team also saw an opportunity to overhaul the methods of their deskless workforce, which accounts for 90% of the company. This deskless majority needed to connect directly to the data that influenced, impacted, and comprised their work. They also required more streamlined processes. AppSheet provided the answer to the workforce’s needs, enabling IT to create applications that simplified key tasks so mobile workers could get their jobs done faster and better.
For example, one BHI client required extensive inspections multiple times a day. Before using AppSheet, a BHI inspector would perform the inspection, return to a computer, record the results from paper to a spreadsheet, copy and paste them into a formatted report in a Google Docs, convert the Doc to a PDF, and email the final inspection report to the customer. This manual process took two hours to complete. Now, using AppSheet, the inspector inputs the results on their mobile device while performing the inspection. As soon as the device connects to the internet, it automatically updates the database with the inspector’s inputs, adds the inspection results to a preformatted report built-in Google Docs, and emails the final report as a PDF to the customer. With AppSheet, BHI shortened this inspection process from two hours to six minutes, saving over $50,000 a month in labor. “With Google Workspace and AppSheet, BHI has turned into a digital company with real-time data allowing for real-time decisions, collaboration, and transparency in a decentralized environment,” says
Johnny Hacking, Director of IT.
An easier software choice for faster results
BHI also found that building apps with AppSheet is much easier than using other solutions, such as developing with low- or full-code tools or purchasing third-party products. Because AppSheet is a true no-code platform, anyone can learn to build and maintain apps. Since adopting AppSheet, the BHI IT team has become so proficient with the platform that they have eliminated the company’s previous backlog of software needs. Now, when a new site opens up, IT proactively works with the site managers to understand its unique requirements in order to build a custom app. Start to finish, scoping, and building this site-specific app typically takes less than a week—compared to months with traditional development platforms.
IT team members aren’t the only BHI employees building apps. As Hacking explains, “We have people that aren’t in IT, and when they have an idea we say hey, log into AppSheet, build it out, and then we’ll help out with some final touches on it.”
Empowering employees outside of IT to build AppSheet apps has benefited teams across the company. For example, one team on a solar farm construction project needed to perform inspections of an array of specialized technical equipment with which IT was not familiar. In this case, the solar team, being the subject matter experts, simply built the app according to their specifications. All IT had to do was jump in at the end to help finalize the app—the final product was completely customized to the solar team’s very specific needs. This highlights the benefits of no-code development: on-the-ground experts build and prototype job-specific apps and IT puts the finishing touches on the functionality, all while keeping guardrails in place.
Using Google Workspace and AppSheet also simplifies BHI’s reliance on third-party software. “Our company divisions are so diverse that they each require different software,” says Hacking. “Plus, if we buy a third-party software, we still have to customize it by getting other software, because they don’t play well together. By replacing this software with AppSheet apps, we save a lot of money. And it’s easy to integrate those apps because on the back end, they’re all connected to Google Sheets.”
For the few third-party software products that BHI hasn’t been able to replace, they’ve used Apps Scripts to import the software’s data into Google Sheets, so that their data all lives on one platform. Overall, BHI has been able to free up 10% of its total IT spend by replacing third-party software with Google Workspace and AppSheet apps.
Company culture transformed by technology
“Because we’ve used Google Workspace and AppSheet and it’s been so successful, people are very willing to use them,” Hacking says. “And for a construction company to gain so much trust in these platforms in such a short period of time—that’s huge. Now we’re at the point where employees are asking, ‘What else can we do?’”
Adopting Google Workspace and AppSheet has not only made BHI more productive, but also transformed the company culture. Employees feel empowered to be more innovative and are constantly seeking ways to improve. Simplifying employees’ work has led to a direct boost in morale.
The role of IT has also transformed. As Hacking explains, “In just three years of using these technologies, IT has gone from being support overhead to being proactively brought to the table to take part in the business strategy.” Increased IT visibility and culpability has helped solve business problems and led to increased profitability.
BHI continues to find new ways to leverage Google Workspace and AppSheet to improve business. In response to COVID, they created a timesheet app that allows employees to clock in without touching a device. Most meetings are now held virtually using Google Meet. Fleet maintenance and repairs are all managed with apps. And, of course, the company has better data and insights than ever. As Hacking puts it, “We’re continuing to stay on the cusp of innovation because of Google Workspace and AppSheet.”
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AppSheet is Useful for Schools & Universities to Custom-build Apps
AppSheet, Google Cloud’s no-code platform that eases application development and automation process without writing even a line of code. In the education space, AppSheet can come in handy easily as a unified platform to build custom applications that also integrates seamlessly with Workspace, allowing schools and universities to save on time and resources on updating IT infrastructure.
From updating sheets, sharing documents and study material over drive to scheduling events on Calendar, organizing lectures and team meets over Meets, AppSheet allows easy collaboration and access. Watch the video to build apps that are best for your University or school using Google Cloud’s AppSheet!
The Secret Behind How ATB Reduced Strategic Planning Time by 50 Percent
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ATB Financial (ATB) operates in a highly competitive financial services space, with competitors ranging from big banks to financial technology startups, ready to grab a slice of the provincial market share. To retain its competitive advantage in an industry primed for disruption, ATB took an active role in its evolution by intentionally transforming the way banking products and services could be delivered. Through this bold transformation, paired with customer-obsession, ATB is primed to make good on its commitment to deliver happiness to its customers by being more than a bank.
To address its goals, ATB launched a new initiative called “Work Reimagined” powered by G Suite, with the aim of helping employees save time, make decisions faster, and spend more time with customers to drive happiness. However, to succeed, ATB needed to equip its distributed, mobile workforce with modern productivity tools that would simplify employee communication and collaboration.
Remote employees often experienced connectivity and performance challenges with the corporate VPN, limiting their productivity. At the same time, legacy office tools did not foster innovation and often slowed business processes, delaying the company’s ability to deliver new services and respond to customer needs.
“We wanted productivity tools that would allow us to make time richer for team members in support of our customers and achieve 10x improvements rather than small gains. We chose G Suite because it enables employees to think and work differently,” says Lorne Rubis, Chief Evangelist, ATB Financial.
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Deep-dive into modern OS architecture built for the cloud
Cloud-based technology–and we all know this–has changed how we work. It has meant that we can work securely from any device, any location, anytime. You can be on a tablet, a phone, a laptop, a desktop, and you get to your work. You can collaborate with others in a really seamless way.
This is something, for those of you that will remember, you know, there was version 12 of the document and you’d send it out to eight people and they’d all give you different revisions and you’d have to somehow merge them together. But now, because it’s in the cloud, and there’s a central place, you can all be collaborating at the same time.
This has really fundamentally changed how fast we work and what happens in challenging times like we’ve been facing for the last several months were working from home didn’t all of a sudden mean you couldn’t do anything. An enormous number of people could continue working if the applications were built for the cloud from the very beginning.
Cloud-native endpoints such as Chrome OS provide the speed, ease of management, and security required as more workloads move to the cloud. This video includes a deep dive into Chrome OS’s multi-layered approach to computing and explores key features that provide differentiated benefits from legacy systems.
Partner Delivery Excellence: Empowering Partners Deliver Customer value with Google Cloud
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With growing demand for Google Cloud, customers are increasingly expecting more reliable advisory and implementation skills from Google Cloud Systems Integrator (SI) Partners. Our model for professional services remains differentiated, with a heavy co-dependence on our SI Partner ecosystem to drive success for our customers. Therefore, enabling and nurturing strong delivery capabilities in our Partners is a responsibility we take seriously. The Google Cloud Global Services Delivery and Global Partner Ecosystem & Channels team jointly made significant investments earlier this year to underscore our commitment in this area. That’s why we’ve created the expanded Partner Delivery Excellence portfolio, a rich set of resources to help Google Cloud Partners deliver high-quality Google Cloud projects. Whether you’re a Partner just getting started with Google Cloud or have prior experience, we have the resources you need to succeed and we’ll meet you where you are in this journey.
Here are some of the key offerings in the Partner Delivery Excellence portfolio:
Stage: Building delivery skills | Pre-engagement
- Delivery Readiness Index (DRI): a framework that enables SI Partners to receive customized, individual level delivery enablement recommendations based on each consultant’s delivery readiness, assessed across training, certifications, delivery skills validation and prior delivery experience.
- Delivery Navigator (coming soon): A delivery management platform consisting of delivery methods, work management tools, and dashboards that enables Google PSO and Partners to drive a high-quality, globally consistent project experience. You’ll hear more about this in an upcoming blog post.
Stage: Develop delivery expertise | Preparing for a delivery project
- Delivery Runbooks: Workload-level detailed delivery guides which include reference architectures, detailed migration steps, validation guidelines, common troubleshooting tips and more.
- Delivery Bootcamps: In-person or hybrid mode multi-day sessions conducted by experienced Google Cloud Consultants and customizable to the specifics of a Google Cloud project for a customer.
- Use case learning: Self-paced learning in the form of bite-sized lectures to build foundational delivery skills at the workload level, with quiz based assessment to validate knowledge gained.
- Delivery labs: Hands-on labs, hosted on our Qwiklabs platform, that complement use-case learning to build and test core delivery skills through a series of practical delivery scenario challenges.
Stage: Leverage Google delivery SMEs | During active project delivery
- Onboarding accelerator: Enables Partners with advisory services to onboard customers on Google Cloud foundations and migrate the first workload quickly and efficiently, by imparting knowledge and best practices from the Technical Onboarding Center. Supported workloads span Infrastructure & Application modernization, Analytics & AI and Databases.
- Delivery Helpdesk: In-the-moment implementation support for Partners during a live Google Cloud project through a standard case management process. Google Global Services Delivery teams well versed in the technology area will advise and help Partners resolve the issue at hand.
- Delivery Assurance Services: Project-level safeguarding services that are delivered in the context of an active Partner-led customer project.
Stage: Leverage Google delivery expertise independent of projects | Build, scale and optimize Google Cloud practices
- Tooling advisory: Assessment of Partner tools with detailed recommendations to enhance tools architecture for better scale, security, ease of use and, where applicable, pointers to Google Cloud open-source tools and best practices.
- Resident Experts: We are selectively introducing this offering of specialists from Google Cloud Consulting teams embedded with Partners for a fixed period of time and with defined scope and deliverables. Partners can leverage these experts to build core delivery capabilities in new areas like generative AI, sharpen existing Google Cloud capabilities in adjacent solution areas like Data & Analytics or have access to expertise to define a comprehensive automation strategy for Google Cloud migration practices.
We are confident that the Partner Delivery Excellence portfolio brings forth much of what’s needed for our Partners to not only deliver high-quality services but also profitably grow their Google Cloud services business quickly and efficiently.
To learn more about the portfolio or to share your feedback or suggestions, please contact your Google Cloud Partner representative.
If you are attending Partner Summit during Google NEXT in August, we look forward to seeing you in the breakout series where we have a dedicated session on this topic.
Thank you for reading. And thank you for your partnership!
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