Eight Steps to Align Hybrid Work with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Principles - Build What's Next
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Eight Steps to Align Hybrid Work with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Principles

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Employee experience and business productivity are interrelated. Hybrid work culture that fosters DEI make workplaces conducive across roles and departments. To align both, here are some eight important steps to aid your company respond today's needs!

Many executives across the globe are feeling the effects of a recent pivot to hybrid work models. This massive transition represents a significant departure from existing office culture. As business leaders look to operationalize their flexible work model infrastructure, they’re also evaluating what it takes to attract and retain employees in this new landscape. Instead of seeing these as separate initiatives, business leaders have a unique opportunity to collectively overhaul corporate culture, focusing on hybrid work and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategies in tandem.

Combining DEI and hybrid work strategies provides a more inclusive culture


Focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion doesn’t mean business leaders are offering an underrepresented individual a specific role or platform because they fit a certain demographic category. Lack of job quality criteria leads to animosity and cultural inequality. Here, diversity means creating a meritocracy with equal pay and equal opportunity for all.

Organizations that thoughtfully combine DEI and hybrid work strategies will produce cultures that improve employee experience and business agility. Integrated DEI and hybrid workplace support better business outcomes by:

Increasing the total available talent pool. A business must cast a wide net for candidates by expanding how and where it searches. Adding a flexible work schedule policy expands potential talent by allowing parents, caregivers, and others to select the hours that work best for their family obligations. Remote work also holds a higher priority in job seekers’ desires. For example, a FlexJobs survey revealed that 24% of workers say the ability to work from home is so important to them that they are willing to take a 10-20% pay cut to work remotely, and 21% would give up some vacation time.

Creating a more inclusive culture. Job seekers want to work for companies that prioritize DEI. According to a recent CNBC and SurveyMonkey Workforce survey, nearly 80% of workers say that they want to work for a company that values diversity, equity, and inclusion. A DEI-centric work culture allows job seekers to feel like there’s a place for them.

Fostering innovation and profitability with broader perspectives. In general, diversity and inclusion promotes the expression of ideas from people with different backgrounds, leading to breakthroughs in creativity, innovation, and attracting new customers. Workplace DEI programs create an employee base that closely mirrors a customer base. A diverse team is less likely to miss potential market opportunities if representative of a broad range of ethnicity, race, age, assigned sex, and socioeconomic backgrounds. A 2020 McKinsey analysis found that companies in the top quartile for ethnic and cultural diversity on executive teams were 36% more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile.

Hybrid work should not derail DEI efforts


While there are numerous benefits to integrating DEI and hybrid work strategies, it would be naive to think it won’t bring challenges. Businesses run the risk of creating new inequities and exacerbating existing ones as they move to hybrid models. One potential issue lies in which employees can work remotely. An HBR article shared how pre-Covid less than 30% of all workers could work from home; only 16% of Latinx workers and 19% of Black workers had remote flexibility, compared to 37% of Asian workers and 30% of white workers.

Even for employees who can work remotely, it’s essential to eliminate “proximity bias.” A study by SHRM found that 67% of surveyed supervisors admitted to considering remote workers more easily replaceable than onsite workers at their organization. Additionally, 72% said they would prefer all of their teams to be working in the office.

A successful hybrid environment strikes a balance between flexibility and inclusivity where individuals feel valued, and everyone has equal opportunities for advancement. In another study, researchers concluded that remote workers and office workers were promoted at the same rate, but found that remote workers’ salaries grew more slowly. Leading companies recognize that physically being at the office full-time isn’t necessary to produce great results.

8 steps to creating a diverse hybrid work culture


As DEI becomes a new business imperative, organizations must work to minimize unconscious bias, creating market-based salaries for all workers, and introducing educational programs that support talent development. Here are some concrete steps you can take to get started.

  • Educate current and future leaders on DEI and hybrid work issues. As you build hybrid work strategies, it’s crucial to discover and understand unconscious biases. According to Deloitte, companies need a holistic DEI learning strategy, including unconscious bias training and developing the conditions for long-term behavior changes.
  • Embrace tools that support DEI and hybrid workplaces. Organizations can leverage technology and AI-enabled HR software to support their efforts. Collaboration tools provide everyone with a voice regardless of where they are (for example, using Spaces for team chats in Google Workspace so that everyone has access to the same information). Video call features such as transcriptions and translation can help the hearing-and-vision-impaired and employees who speak different languages. It’s also possible to purchase recruiting solutions with AI technology to reduce the chance of bias or discrimination when reviewing candidates.
  • Strengthen culture by marrying DEI with meritocracy. There should also be explicit guidelines to ensure the systems and processes for hiring and promoting individuals are both transparent and equitable. One method for accomplishing this goal is to define detailed job requirements and metrics per role to understand what skills are associated with specific functions. It’s also essential to ensure you’ve designed these processes in a way that screens out bias. Leading companies will deploy analytics tools to evaluate the systems’ fairness and track if the systems are progressing against diversity targets.
  • Create upskilling programs to train employees. Many organizations struggle to find talent with the right skill sets. One solution to this problem is to invest in educating existing employees. Companies must develop diverse talent at every level to create a pipeline of candidates that progresses into senior management. Similar to the way companies offered management training programs to college graduates, organizations should design programs that provide skills enhancement for entry and mid-level employees. Almost every job will require a certain level of technical skill—organizations must upskill existing talent.
  • Restructure compensation before employees leave. It’s easier to retain an employee than to onboard and train a new hire. According to the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank’s wage growth tracker, wages for people who have switched jobs have outpaced those who’ve stayed at one employer since 2011. One way to retain talent is to right-size salaries to a competitive market rate.
  • Remember that money isn’t everything. While individuals may switch jobs for money, they often stay in a position for the culture. Creating a leading employee experience helps organizations keep talent. Work from home programs, flexible work schedules, and advanced programs such as childcare benefits help build the foundation. But increasingly, individuals are looking for a sense of belonging. According to research from McKinsey, employees who feel included are three times more likely to report being excited about working for their organization and committed to its success. Another McKinsey report focusing on attrition shows that employees primarily leave companies because they don’t feel valued or don’t have a sense of belonging.
  • Don’t forget to commit the resources. Most organizations built their cultures before DEI and hybrid work were requirements. These companies must invest in new work tools and educational programs, and create new hiring and talent management practices. A business can make a more significant impact with fewer resources by ensuring purchases and processes support flexible and inclusive work cultures.
  • Make sure actions are backed up with DEI transparency measurements. The pressure to support DEI could lead to situations where activities are celebrated over results. While it’s not easy to be vulnerable and transparent about where the problems exist, employers should take stock of where they are today. They should present this authentically, create goals for the future, and design a measurable action plan to track its progress. With so many variables and unknowns, it’s crucial for talent leaders to track the way that hybrid work and DEI efforts advance.

Diversity should be part of your efforts because it’s the culture you want to create. However, ignoring diversity efforts can also come with ramifications. For example, Goldman Sachs announced in 2021 that the firm would only underwrite IPOs in the United States and Europe for companies with at least two diverse board members. Meanwhile, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission adopted new rules this summer that require Nasdaq-listed companies to have at least two diverse directors – including one woman and at least one member of an underrepresented community.

In order for the benefits of diversity to emerge in the workplace, companies need to enact cultural and behavioral change. As stated in the ICSM report, “Never become too comfortable with your efforts, as there is always room for improvement with diversity at your organization, whether you see it or not.” It’s clear that what organizations have done to attract talent in the past isn’t resonating the same way today. A diverse workforce delivers better ideas and stronger communities, building deeper relationships with customers along the way. Moving forward, it’s expected that a company’s investment in a diverse, inclusive, and hybrid work culture will set it apart from its competition, leading to increased business agility and better financial outcomes.

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Gmail’s BIMI Increases Confidence about Security and Delivers Immersive Email Experiences

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Last year, Gmail announced Brand Indicators for Message Identification or BIMI to deliver secure-by-default email experiences. Soon, Gmail's general support of BIMI will drive strong sender authentication in the email ecosystem. Read to know more.

Creating a secure-by-default experience based on robust defenses has always been a core design principle for Gmail. That’s why we’ve established a strong baseline of security in Gmail, with built-in protections to help automatically filter out potentially malicious messages. While these defenses help keep Gmail users safe, email functions as part of a large, complex, interconnected ecosystem that we continually invest in and work to protect. After first announcing Gmail’s Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) pilot last year, today we’re announcing that over the coming weeks we’re rolling out Gmail’s general support of BIMI, an industry standard that aims to drive adoption of strong sender authentication for the entire email ecosystem. BIMI provides email recipients and email security systems increased confidence in the source of emails, and enables senders to provide their audience with a more immersive experience.

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“Bank of America has a wide range of security measures in place to support our customers, and we constantly evolve our program to deliver best in class protection. Part of this effort is our partnership with Google on BIMI, which provides an easy way to validate if correspondence is from us.” — Bank of America

BIMI enables organizations that authenticate their emails using Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC)—a standard for providing strong sender authentication that allows security systems to perform better filtering, separating legitimate messages from potentially spoofed ones—to validate ownership of their logos and securely transmit them to Google. BIMI is designed to be easy: for organizations with DMARC in place, validated logos display on authenticated emails from their domains and subdomains.

Here’s how it works: Organizations who authenticate their emails using Sender Policy Framework (SPF) or Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) and deploy DMARC can provide their validated trademarked logos to Google via a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC). BIMI leverages Mark Verifying Authorities, like Certification Authorities, to verify logo ownership and provide proof of verification in a VMC. Once these authenticated emails pass our other anti-abuse checks, Gmail will start displaying the logo in the existing avatar slot.  

“Gmail’s support of BIMI is a win for email authentication, brand trust, and consumers alike. BIMI gives organizations the opportunity to provide their customers with a more immersive email experience, strengthening email sender authentication across the entire email ecosystem.” — Seth Blank, Chair of the AuthIndicators Working Group

This is just the start for BIMI. The standard expects to expand support across logo types and validators. For logo validation, BIMI is starting by supporting the validation of trademarked logos, since they are a common target of impersonation. Today, Entrust and DigiCert support BIMI as Certification Authorities, and in the future the BIMI working group expects this list of supporting validation authorities to expand further. To learn more about BIMI and see the latest news, visit the working group’s website.

To take advantage of BIMI, ensure that your organization has adopted DMARC, and that you have validated your logo with a VMC. For Gmail users, no action is required. We’re proud to be one of the leading members in both establishing and supporting the BIMI standard and will continue to support efforts that contribute to security for the entire email ecosystem.

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Google’s Open Subsea Cable ‘Firmina’ to Improve South Americans’ Access to Google Products

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Google's Firmina, is the world's longest subsea cable connecting East Coast of the U.S. to Las Toninas, Argentina, with additional landings in Praia Grande, Brazil, and Punta del Este, Uruguay to improve South America's access to its products.

Today, we’re announcing Firmina, an open subsea cable being built by Google that will run from the East Coast of the United States to Las Toninas, Argentina, with additional landings in Praia Grande, Brazil, and Punta del Este, Uruguay. Firmina will be the longest cable in the world capable of running entirely from a single power source at one end of the cable if its other power source(s) become temporarily unavailable—a resilience boost at a time when reliable connectivity is more important than ever. 

As people and businesses have come to depend on digital services for many aspects of their lives, Firmina will improve access to Google services for users in South America. With 12 fiber pairs, the cable will carry traffic quickly and securely between North and South America, giving users fast, low-latency access to Google products such as Search, Gmail and YouTube, as well as Google Cloud services.

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Single-end power source capability is important for reliability, a key priority for Google’s network. With submarine cables, data travels as pulses of light inside the cable’s optical fibers. That light signal is amplified every 100 km with a high-voltage electrical current supplied at landing stations in each country. While shorter cable systems can enjoy the higher availability of power feeding from a single end, longer cables with large fiber-pair counts make this harder to do. Firmina breaks this barrier—connecting North to South America, the cable will be the longest ever to feature single-end power feeding capability. Achieving this record-breaking, highly-resilient design is accomplished by supplying the cable with a voltage 20% higher than with previous systems.

Celebrating the world’s visionaries

We sought to honor a luminary who worked to advance human understanding and social justice. The cable is named after Maria Firmina dos Reis (1825 – 1917), a Brazilian abolitionist and author whose 1859 novel, Úrsula, depicted life for Afro-Brazilians under slavery. A mixed-race woman and intellectual, Firmina is considered Brazil’s first novelist. With this cable, we’re thrilled to draw attention to her pioneering work and spirit. You can learn more about Firmina in this Google Doodle.

Including Firmina, we now have investments in 16 subsea cables, such as Dunant, Equiano and Grace Hopper, and consortium cables like Echo, JGA, INDIGO, and Havfrue. We’re continuing our work of building out a robust global network and infrastructure, which includes Google data centers and Google Cloud regions around the world. 

Learn more about our infrastructure.

Case Study

The Incredible Story of How Hero MotoCorp Moved 6,000 Users to the Cloud in 45 Days

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Hero MotoCorp completed a migration to G Suite in just 45 days to provide 6,000 employees within its business and employees at affiliate companies with the tools for highly secure and efficient collaboration.

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 DocsSheetsSlides, 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.”

Case Study

Groupe Dauphinoise Grows it Customer Base with G Suite and Google Cloud Platform

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Groupe Dauphinoise is a agricultural cooperative whose 1,500 employees spend their days out of the office. The company transitioned to G Suite to improve the flexibility and collaboration of its staff--and then quickly realized the power of Google Cloud.

As a leading French agricultural cooperative, Groupe Dauphinoise places collaboration at the heart of its philosophy. Working with farmers in the Rhone-Alpes region, Groupe Dauphinoise takes on a diverse range of activities from agricultural production to research and development to running retail outlets.

As its operations expanded and strained its existing infrastructure, Groupe Dauphinoise saw the opportunity to upgrade its technology solutions and adopted G Suite, Chrome devices and ultimately Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

“We transitioned to G Suite to improve our staff’s collaboration. We quickly realized that as the company grew, we needed a new infrastructure. Based on our satisfaction with G Suite, we chose GCP. With Google, ‘any device, anytime, anywhere’ is not just a dream,” says Sylvain Claudel, Head of IT at Groupe Dauphinoise.

“We transitioned to G Suite to improve our staff’s collaboration. We quickly realized that as the company grew, we needed a new infrastructure. Based on our satisfaction with G Suite, we chose GCP. With Google, ‘any device, anytime, anywhere’ is not just a dream.”

Sylvain Claudel, Head of IT, Groupe Dauphinoise

Flexible workforce, stable infrastructure

Many of Groupe Dauphinoise’s 1,500 employees spend their days out of the office. Five years ago, with the help of Google partner GoWizYou, the company transitioned to G Suite to improve the flexibility and collaboration of its staff.

As Groupe Dauphinoise began to expand and collect more data, the company reached the limits of its on-premise infrastructure. Adding new storage was not a simple matter. Acquiring, configuring and synchronising new servers costs Groupe Dauphinoise time as well as money. In addition, with all its servers stored in a single room, security was a concern. Groupe Dauphinoise needed a new infrastructure.

Google Cloud Platform was the only solution in mind after Groupe Dauphinoise’s experience with G Suite and Chromebooks. Disruption was kept to a minimum thanks to Google’s licensing agreements with Microsoft products, allowing the company to migrate without affecting its operations.

After migrating its infrastructure to Compute Engine, Groupe Dauphinoise can let Google look after the security and maintenance. Cloud IAM makes it easy for Groupe Dauphinoise to hand out permissions to sensitive resources across a number of sites with maximum security and minimum fuss. The company placed its archives in Cloud Storage, while Cloud SQL allows it to continue to make use of its MySQL databases without disrupting the day to day business. Meanwhile, BigQuery provides Groupe Dauphinoise with the raw power to analyse large datasets quickly.

“Our company is growing and we have more and more data to collect and analyze like sales data, weather patterns or production numbers. With GCP, we have more than a single on-premise data store, so our disaster recovery plan is much more flexible. Compute Engine allows us to add more storage quickly and easily, without having to spend days synchronizing data and installing new servers. We have improved security and maintained the stability of our infrastructure while keeping costs down,” says Sylvain.

Safeguarding the present, looking to the future

With Google Cloud Platform, Groupe Dauphinoise has expanded and secured its infrastructure without sinking costs into on-premise servers or DevOps staff. Its investment in Chrome devices and adoption of G Suite mean that its mobile workforce can fully reap the benefits of a cloud-based infrastructure while dramatically cutting the cost of hardware. Meanwhile, working with a 200 million line table of sales data in Google BigQuery, the cooperative found that queries ran ten times faster than with its previous database provider. Groupe Dauphinoise is experimenting with Google BigQuery to expand its BI capabilities. Products like Google BigQuery help Groupe Dauphinoise grow its business, safe in the knowledge that its infrastructure is stable and secure.

“The amount of data we collect is growing very quickly. We need to break our rules and evolve from the mindset that we had with on-premise infrastructure and our old databases. We can now look at collecting more customer fidelity data, or big data for our farmers. With our data and infrastructure in Google’s care, we can concentrate on growing our customer base instead of our IT department!” says Sylvain.

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How Google Meet Keeps Your Video Conferences Secure

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In a world where video conferencing and collaboration tools are getting a bad name for their lack of security, Google Cloud's G Suite and Google Meet stand out for their security, resilience, and being compliant.

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.
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Request and approval to join a meeting

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 SOCISO/IEC 27001/17/18HITRUST, 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.

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