Cloud Security

Google announces security guidance team, hardened Workspace

The Google corporate logo and Google Cloud logo stand outside the Google Germany offices on Aug. 31, 2021, in Berlin. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

At Google Cloud's Next conference Tuesday, the computing giant announced several new initiatives, headlined by a digital transformation security advisory team and a new security-bolstered Workspace environment it believes will offer Microsoft ecosystem-type features at a fraction of the cost.

The Google Cybersecurity Action Team, which Google Cloud vice president and general manager of security Sunil Potti abbreviated as GCAT during a conversation with reporters, is intended to be part of Google's $5 billion commitment to the White House to bolster national cybersecurity.

"The vision of this team is to guide customers through the cycle of their security transformation, from the first cloud adoption roadmap and implementation through increasing their cyber resilience preparedness for potential events, all the way through to kind of engineering new solutions in partnership with them as requirements change," said Phil Venables, vice president and chief information security officer of Google Cloud.

GCAT will offer four key capabilities for cybersecurity: strategic advisory services, compliance, customer and solutions engineering, and threat intelligence and incident response.

Google also announced Work Safer, a combination of their Workspaces cloud office environment and their BeyondCorp Enterpries zero trust system that can integrate Palo Alto Networks, Cybereason and CrowdStrike capabilities for additional security.

"One of the biggest sources of both state-influenced attacks, as well as archaic architecture, are in places around email and collaboration tools, around using on-prem Exchange servers and there's not a month that goes by without some news around it," said Sunil Potti, vice president and general manager of Google Cloud Security.

"The comparison that we're offering is the functionality of Google Enterprise class which is equal to an [Office365] E5 at a meaningful cost advantage, including for large enterprises, an investment from Google that actually seamlessly migrates from your old environment to your new environment, while also offering a bunch of additional security," he later added.

Joe Uchill

Joe is a senior reporter at SC Weekly, focused on policy issues. He previously covered cybersecurity for Axios, The Hill and the Christian Science Monitor’s short-lived Passcode website.

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