How Google Meet Keeps Your Video Conferences Secure
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All over the world, businesses, schools and users depend on G Suite to help them stay connected and get work done. Google designs, builds, and operates our products on a secure foundation, aimed at thwarting attacks and providing the protections needed to keep you safe. G Suite and Google Meet are no exception.
Google Meet’s security controls are turned on by default, so that in most cases, organizations and users won’t have to do a thing to ensure the right protections are in place. Here, we’ll summarize the key capabilities of Google Meet that help protect you.
Proactive protections to combat abuse and block hijacking attempts
Google Meet employs an array of counter-abuse protections to keep your meetings safe. These include anti-hijacking measures for both web meetings and dial-ins.
Google Meet makes it difficult to programatically brute force meeting IDs (this is when a malicious individual attempts to guess the ID of a meeting and make an unauthorized attempt to join it) by using codes that are 10 characters long, with 25 characters in the set. We limit the ability of external participants to join a meeting more than 15 minutes in advance, reducing the window in which a brute force attack can even be attempted. External participants cannot join meetings unless they’re on the calendar invite or have been invited by in-domain participants. Otherwise, they must request to join the meeting, and their request must be accepted by a member of the host organization.
In addition, we’re rolling out several features to help schools keep meetings safe and improve the remote learning experiences for teachers and students, including:
- Only meeting creators and calendar owners can mute or remove other participants. This ensures that instructors can’t be removed or muted by student participants.
- Only meeting creators and calendar owners can approve requests to join made by external participants. This means that students can’t allow external participants to join via video, and that external participants can’t join before the instructor.
- Meeting participants can’t rejoin nicknamed meetings once the final participant has left. This means if the instructor is the last person to leave a nicknamed meeting, students can’t join later without the instructor present.
Secure deployment and access controls for admins and end-users
To limit the attack surface and eliminate the need to push out frequent security patches, Google Meet works entirely in your browser. This means we do not require or ask for any plugins or software to be installed if you use Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Microsoft Edge. On mobile, we recommend that you install the Google Meet app.
To help ensure that only authorized users administer and access Meet services, we support multiple 2-Step Verification options for accounts that are secure and convenient. These include hardware and phone-based security keys and Google prompt. Additionally, Google Meet users can enroll their account in our Advanced Protection Program (APP), which provides our strongest protections available against phishing and account hijacking and is specifically designed for the highest-risk accounts.
For G Suite Enterprise and G Suite for Education customers, we offer Access Transparency, which logs any Google access to Google Meet recordings stored in Drive, along with the reason for the access (support team actions that you might have requested, for example). Customers can also use data regions functionality to store select/covered data of Google Meet recordings in specific regions (i.e. US or Europe).
Secure, compliant, and reliable meeting infrastructure
In Google Meet, all data is encrypted in transit by default between the client and Google for video meetings on a web browser, on the Android and iOS apps, and in meeting rooms with Google meeting room hardware. Meet adheres to IETF security standards for Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) and Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP). For every person and for every meeting, Meet generates a unique encryption key, which only lives as long as the meeting, is never stored to disk, and is transmitted in an encrypted and secured RPC (remote procedure call) during the meeting setup.
Security is an integral part of all our operations at Google. Our team of full-time security and privacy professionals supports our software engineering and operations to ensure that security is always a part of how we build and run our services. All of our Google Cloud and G Suite customers benefit from these capabilities, including:
- Secure-by-design infrastructure: Google Meet benefits from Google Cloud’s defense-in-depth approach to security, which utilizes the built-in protections and global-private network that Google uses to secure your information and safeguard your privacy.
- Compliance certifications: Our Google Cloud products, including Google Meet, regularly undergo independent verification of their security, privacy, and compliance controls, including validation against standards such as SOC, ISO/IEC 27001/17/18, HITRUST, and FedRAMP. We support your compliance requirements around regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA, as well as COPPA and FERPA for education.
- Incident management: We have a rigorous process for managing data and security incidents that specifies actions, escalations, mitigation, resolution, and notification of any potential incidents impacting customer data.
- Reliability: Google’s network is engineered to accommodate peak demand and handle future growth. Our network is resilient and engineered to accommodate the increased activity we’ve seen on Google Meet.
- Transparency: At Google Cloud, we’re clear about our commitments regarding customer data: we process customer data according to your instructions; we never use customer data for advertising purposes; and we publish the locations of our Google data centers, which are highly available, resilient, and secure.
During COVID-19 and beyond, we will continue to protect Google Meet users and their data, and keep innovating with new features to make our tools helpful, secure, and safe.
Google Workspace and Miro Together Bring Immersive Team Collaboration Experience
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While many of us are navigating the shift to hybrid work, every team’s experience is unique. Distributed work is taking many different forms—from the fully remote to a specific mix of in-person and in-office—but there are potential gaps across all the places that people work. Google Workspace helps teams bridge these gaps by providing tools for them to connect, create and collaborate securely wherever they are. Today, we’re taking this one step further by announcing new ways to bring Miro’s intuitive whiteboard experience to Google Workspace so that teams can ideate and innovate more immersively.
With a shared commitment to extending inclusive, flexible collaboration experiences for all, we’re partnering with Miro to bring whiteboarding capabilities into Google Meet. We’re also deepening the existing experience within Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, making it easier for teams to ideate and co-create asynchronously and in real time.
Deepening collaboration in meetings
With the new Miro experience in Meet, you’ll get an immersive side-by-side video and whiteboard experience that’s ideal for brainstorming, sketching, and iteration during meetings. This approach fosters idea generation and participation from all team members, even if they’re in different locations. And using a Miro whiteboard in Meet is seamless: simply attach the Miro whiteboard to the meeting in Google Calendar or select a board during a meeting to share and collaborate in real-time. These new experiences will be available in early 2022.
Seamlessly integrate content from Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides
Real-time collaboration across a distributed team often spans multiple files—from brainstorming in documents, to project management in spreadsheets, to presenting your ideas in slides. Miro integrates with Google Drive, so teams can easily access and embed their Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides into Miro’s infinite canvas, making it easier to visualize and manage all the pieces of a project from one shared space. You can also save your Miro boards to Drive, and Docs, Sheets, and Slides automatically sync across both applications, so you’re always working with the latest content.
Start using Miro in Google Workspace today
The Miro app for Workspace is one of the growing number of 3rd-party applications you can use to bring the apps and services you use every day to your Google Workspace experience. Try the Miro app in Workspace with your existing credentials, or sign up for Workspace and Miro to start using the free versions together. And stay tuned for future innovation as we partner with Miro on delivering visual collaboration capabilities that are mission critical for the hybrid workplace.
The Incredible Story of How Hero MotoCorp Moved 6,000 Users to the Cloud in 45 Days
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Assembling thousands of parts into one motorbike or scooter every 17 seconds is a complex task requiring accuracy and precision. For Hero MotoCorp — an India-headquartered manufacturer of two-wheeler vehicles — workforce collaboration, security, and mobility complement these processes and provide the cornerstone of the organization’s global operations.
Based in New Delhi, Hero MotoCorp is one of the world’s largest makers of two-wheeler vehicles, with a production capacity of 9 million units from five manufacturing plants in India and one each in Colombia and Bangladesh. The business has more than 90 million customers and operates in 37 countries across Asia, Africa, and South and Central America. In its home market, HeroMotoCorp sells one in every two two-wheelers.
Innovation and agility
Innovation and agility are deeply embedded in Hero MotoCorp’s culture and operations. Its Center of Innovation and Technology at Jaipur in Rajasthan, northern India, undertakes extensive product design and development, testing, and validation.
Hero MotoCorp has also established a technology center at Stephanskirchen, near Munich in Germany, to develop new vehicle concepts and technologies.
For several years, Hero MotoCorp relied on a traditional email solution to enable its employees to communicate and complete tasks. However, this solution could not provide the functionality, performance, ease of use, and security the business needed to maintain its market leadership.
“Our Chief Information Officer, Mr. Vijay Sethi, was the first to migrate to and embrace the features of G Suite and set an example to our workforce.”
Sujoy Brahmachari, Sr. GM and CISO, Hero MotoCorp
“Security, in particular, is extremely important — we don’t want our product design and development details falling into the wrong hands,” says Sujoy Brahmachari, Sr. GM and CISO, Hero MotoCorp. “We needed a solution that would allow us to control and monitor the distribution of sensitive information within and outside our organization.”
In early 2015, Hero MotoCorp’s technology team began evaluating email and workplace collaboration applications that could help the business realize its longer-term ambitions.
Collaboration key to success
“We were focused on a product that could drive greater collaboration among our workforce,” says Brahmachari. “In addition, we wanted to use the product on our desktops, laptops, mobile devices, and other devices. Finally, we needed to ensure email, other applications, and data were secure and available as and when we needed them.”
Hero MotoCorp’s evaluation found G Suite met all these requirements while being intuitive and easy to use. Furthermore, the cloud-based suite of intelligent applications provided a lower total cost of ownership than the business’s existing email solution and potential alternatives.
A 45-day migration
The business completed its review and completed the migration in just 45 days in 2015. “We worked closely with Google and our partners to complete the process in an innovative way that prioritized speed,” says Brahmachari. “For example, we migrated only three months’ worth of emails from our incumbent solution to G Suite, rather than the entire data repository.”
“Our teams are very happy and collaborative – employees can use Gmail through G Suite without being concerned about storage limits and can connect with colleagues, partners, customers, and other stakeholders through the chat, video, and audio call capabilities of Hangouts Meet.”
Sujoy Brahmachari, Sr. GM and CISO, Hero MotoCorp
Hero MotoCorp started the migration with a function-wise approach, creating batches and moving them overnight to G Suite. It created an internal video for employees to learn how to work using G Suite. It also created intranet posts to provide easy reference to all employees and established a service desk to respond to questions.
“Our Chief Information Officer, Mr. Vijay Sethi, was the first to migrate to and embrace the features of G Suite and set an example to our workforce,” says Brahmachari.
Deployed to 6,000 users
Hero MotoCorp has deployed G Suite to about 6,000 users in its core business and many users in affiliate companies. The company’s user-focused approach to the deployment, and the intuitive, easy-to-use nature of the product, has prompted the business’s workforce to embrace the full potential of G Suite.
“Our teams are very happy and collaborative — employees can use Gmail through G Suite without being concerned about storage limits and can connect with colleagues, partners, customers, and other stakeholders through the chat, video, and audio call capabilities of Hangouts Meet,” says Brahmachari.
Employees can also create, store, and access Docs, Sheets, Slides, and other file types on Drive — helping to ensure new product development, delivery schedules, budgeting, and other activities needed to keep a leading multinational manufacturer ahead of its competitors can be completed quickly and collaboratively.
Deployed to mobile devices
“With G Suite, information is available in the cloud to any employee at any time. The collaboration this enables plays a vital role in sustaining our leadership position.”
Sujoy Brahmachari, Sr. GM and CISO, Hero MotoCorp
Hero MotoCorp has also been able to give employees access to G Suite on a range of mobile devices — with administrators using mobile management to secure access applications and data on iOS and Android devices. The business is using the feature to require devices to have a screen lock or password; remote-wipe information from lost or stolen devices; and monitor from a central console the devices that access corporate data.
Further, Hero MotoCorp can use G Suite features to set and enforce policies and control system configuration and administration, while taking advantage of independently verified security, privacy, and compliance controls to meet business requirements.
With G Suite deployed and delivering value, Hero MotoCorp is now implementing or evaluating a range of Google technologies. For example, the business is using Google Maps Platform to power navigation for owners of new Hero MotoCorp two-wheelers and use Cloud Vision AI to enable immediate recognition of spare parts. “We are also evaluating Google Cloud data search and management technologies for potential application within the organization,” says Brahmachari.
The business is now well-positioned to accelerate into new markets and product development. “With G Suite, information is available in the cloud to any employee at any time,” says Brahmachari. “The collaboration this enables plays a vital role in sustaining our leadership position.”
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When it comes to data analysis, it’s easy to fall into routine. But no matter how much of a whiz you are at formulas or pivot tables, superb spreadsheet skills only take you so far if you’re working with multiple versions or outdated datasets.
On average, your employees spend up to eight hours each week—an entire work day—searching for and consolidating information.
What if businesses spent their time applying data insights instead of tracking them down?
Working in the cloud means your data can easily stay up to date because information is automatically saved as it’s typed. Multiple team members can collaborate in real-time from their phone, tablet or computer (online and offline) and create a single source of truth for projects, like quarterly budgets.
Powered by Google’s machine intelligence, Sheets does a lot
of the heavy
lifting for you when it comes to data analysis. You can ask a question
about your data and Sheets will return an answer using natural language
processing. Sheets also builds
charts, suggests
formulas and creates
pivot tables for you.
Google Maps Platform Helps BungkusIT Fulfil its Promise of Deliveries in One Hour!
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Editor’s note: Today’s post is written by Hatim M, Chief Commercial Officer at BungkusIT. The on-demand delivery service delivers packages within the hour for one million customers across Malaysia and uses Google Maps Platform to create a seamless end-to-end delivery experience for its customers.
Imagine it’s the end of a long day at work, and you’re heading home for dinner as you look forward to a restful evening. Then just as you arrive at the doorstep, your phone buzzes with a message from a family member, asking if you could grab a carton of milk from the supermarket.
With moments like these in mind, we founded BungkusIT to alleviate the stress of everyday chores and give people a break from having to run seemingly mundane errands that can often be time-consuming. With so much to do and so few hours in a day, we want to make life simpler by providing our customers with an on-demand delivery service.
As a social enterprise, our mission is to create jobs and increase earning potential for BungkusIT roadies (those who run deliveries), while also increasing online visibility for local small and medium enterprises through an e-commerce platform. As such, we don’t charge merchants a fee for being featured on our app.
Our roadies help connect users with products and services that they need. Whether it’s picking up the keys you forgot, or buying a birthday cake for a loved one, our on-demand roadies can help accomplish your task quickly and efficiently. In fact, we’ve helped many seniors—a large and often underserved population—to run errands and provide last mile support.
Providing reliable service, 24/7
From the day we launched, our promise has always been to complete every task given to us within one hour. Google Maps Platform empowers us to fulfil this promise. We understand the importance of selecting a reliable mapping service from the get-go. After exploring different map products, we made the decision to go with Google Maps Platform due to its detailed and accurate location mapping system. With the support of our partner Searce, we’ve been able to quickly integrate all the relevant products on our platform and optimize our API calls.
On a day-to-day basis, our roadies rely on the Places API to navigate their journeys. It pinpoints the exact location set by customers so that our roadies can be sure they arrive at the correct destination. With so many small roads and alleys in Malaysia, it can be challenging to find the exact place based on an address. Dropping a pin on a specific location removes any confusion.
Because we price our services based on distance, it’s business critical to determine the exact distance of a location and the most efficient route to reach it. By automating that process with the Distance Matrix API, we can guarantee that customers don’t get overcharged, while making sure that we’re adequately compensated for our services.
Improving the user experience
At the end of the day, we want to make people’s lives easier. That’s why having an app that is intuitive is key. More than that, we want customers to be able to create a request as quickly as possible. By automatically completing the location a customer is typing after they’ve keyed in the first few characters, Place Autocomplete does that job for us.
As a fairly young company, we’ve got a long way to go. I believe that we’ll continue evolving alongside Google Maps Platform and exploring the new features it has to offer. We’re already talking to global brands to expand our services and I’m confident that with Google Maps Platform as our maps partner, we will go a long way.
For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.
Google Cloud Partnership Helps Lowe’s SRE Team Achieve 20X More Releases Per Month
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Editor’s note: Today we hear from the Lowe’s SRE team. They share about how they have been able to increase the number of releases they can support by adopting Google’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) framework and leveraging their partnership with Google Cloud.
At Lowe’s, we’ve made significant progress in our multiyear technology transformation. To modernize our systems and build new capabilities for our customers and associates, we leverage Google’s SRE framework and Google Cloud, which helps us meet their needs faster and more effectively. With these efforts, we’ve been able to go from one release every two weeks to 20+ releases daily—about 20X more releases per month.
Our SRE transformation didn’t happen overnight, though. Every step along the way brought some challenges. But looking back, we are excited to see how much we have accomplished for our customers as a result.
Back in 2018, before adopting SRE practices, we were more reactive than proactive, following an “eyes on glass” approach. On-call structures and incident management efficiency were not at optimal levels with too many repetitive and manual tasks, resulting in operational toil. Production concerns were not surfaced into the product roadmap, which resulted in delays in making fixes.
Bootstrapping SRE at Lowe’s
As we moved from on-prem to Google Cloud, we decided to move from a monolithic- to microservices-based architecture. And to better manage this new architecture, we embarked on an SRE journey.
Then as COVID-19 hit, we really had to accelerate this journey as customers increasingly moved to online ordering and delivery to meet their Total Home Improvement needs. To do so, we followed four key principles that allowed us to meet changing customer needs quickly and release fast and reliably.
- Automate away toil
As we moved from traditional Ops to an SRE ecosystem, our biggest opportunity was reducing toil, so that engineers can spend time on activities that drive business impact and customer outcomes. We think of toil as work that is manual, repetitive, tactical, devoid of enduring value—but automatable. So, to tackle toil, we focused on automating away the need for manual intervention. As an example, we made sure engineers were not the first point of contact for any alert. Any triage or resolution that an engineer can perform, a machine can be trained to do the same. We used supervised and unsupervised learning techniques to automate our toil. With a long-term goal of “no toil,” our SREs work on identifying and reducing toil to a manageable level across the organization. - Engineer alignment through roadmaps
Our goal is to maximize the engineering velocity of developer teams while keeping products reliable. We want an engagement model where product, SRE and development teams are closely aligned. A key way we’ve been able to create this alignment is by having our SREs embedded into domain and product teams. Each domain has an SRE, who is involved at the beginning stages of product development to ensure that the domain stakeholders are in alignment with the SRE initiatives. As such, SREs are able to improve the reliability, performance, scalability and launch velocity of the services throughout all phases of the service lifecycle. - Adopt one-touch releases
Our path to production used to contain many manual steps and validations, slowing the rate at which we released features. Additionally, we used to bulk all our releases together to deploy at once, which increased the risk of failure and created a longer feedback loop from production. To tackle this with an SRE mindset, we created a one-touch release process in which SREs review the product team’s pull requests. When approved, this triggers a DevSecOps pipeline that deploys the approved changes to production securely. This process created a safe, reliable and sustainable continuous delivery pipeline with quick feedback loops. Striking the right balance between speed, innovation and stability, we were able to increase our releases exponentially for the year, taking less than 30 minutes per release to deliver quality code, including various automated quality checks and processes, all in just one click. - Embrace capacity planning
To ensure our services have enough spare capacity to handle any surge in traffic patterns, our SREs emphasize capacity planning, making recommended capacity changes in the continuous delivery (CD) pipeline. They constantly monitor performance to make sure the service is robust, stable and available. And when there’s a sudden surge beyond the forecasted volume, SREs change the capacity on demand and document changes for the performance and domain teams.
Capacity planning is especially important for us during peak holiday times such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM). We lay out our SRE stability plan three months in advance and surface into the domain team’s product roadmap. This way development teams are able to allocate sufficient engineering time to reliability. We do performance testing to ensure the environment is able to sustain increased load over long periods of time and also handle sudden surges in traffic. We also do region failover testing at a global scale to validate the automatic failover duration of service level agreements (SLAs), SRE and domain readiness. Additionally, we conduct Black Friday and Cyber Monday-specific destructive testing to validate customer experience, reliability and more.
Google Cloud’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday white-glove service played a key role in ensuring our success in both BFCM 2019 and BFCM 2020. This service included on-site visits from Google’s Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) team who reviewed Lowe’s web architecture, capacity planning, operations practices for event risks, and presented workshops on topics such as incident response best practices.
Looking ahead
There is always room for improvement, and at Lowe’s we aim to continuously improve our SRE practices. One thing that has worked well for us, which we plan to continue, has been our road shows, where senior SRE leads present to other SREs and application domain teams on the latest SRE principles and best practices, and to get input in real-time from them.
Google’s tools and methodology have played an instrumental role in helping reshape our SRE practices and better serve our customers. We look forward to building on the momentum and partnership as we continue our SRE journey at Lowe’s.
If you want to learn more about how to adopt SRE best practices on Google Cloud, check out our documentation. If you want to learn more about Google SRE, visit our website. Stay tuned for the next blogs with Lowe’s discussing how they trained their engineering talent to adopt SRE practices and tooling, and how they improved MTTR using SRE principles.
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