Google Workspace integrates Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, and collaboration tools into a seamless productivity ecosystem. However, this interconnected environment can also introduce significant security challenges, ranging from identity management issues to data leakage and misconfigurations. Valence Security provides a proactive approach to safeguarding your Google Workspace, offering unparalleled visibility and automated remediation to mitigate these risks effectively.
Challenges in Google Workspace Security
Google Workspace’s integration of multiple services creates a broad attack surface. As a primary productivity and collaboration suite, Google Workspace also stores extensive amounts of sensitive data—in emails, calendars, messages, and files—which can be at risk without proper security configuration and best practices. Security risks include:
Misconfigurations
Google Workspace Admin portal offers security admins a wide variety of options to improve their security posture by enabling/disabling features and/or adding security controls. This requires analyzing hundreds of security options from enabling advanced email security options, blocking automated email forwarding capabilities, limiting session durations and many others, and ensuring they are properly configured across all users, groups and organizational units.
Identity and Access Management Risks
Identity management in Google Workspace is continuously complex. While security teams understand that they must ensure that 2-Step Verification for MFA is both enrolled and enforced across all relevant user accounts, minimize accounts with Super Admin access or other high-privilege roles, and have effective lifecycle management - it’s a daunting task, especially with the spread across employees, contractors and service accounts.
Data Security Risks
Google Workspace and specifically Google Drive enables seamless collaboration, allowing users to share files both internally and externally. While this flexibility drives productivity, it also creates opportunities for sensitive data to be mishandled. Anonymous sharing with anyone with the link or shares with personal email addresses, can create significant exposure of sensitive data. In most cases, external file shares quickly become dormant and are no longer used by external collaborators, which means that shares remain open without a business justification.
SaaS-to-SaaS Integration Risks
Google Workspace offers multiple ways to integrate with other platforms - such as Third-party Apps, OAuth token, Domain-wide Delegation, Apps Script and App-Specific Password. Ensuring these integrations are properly configured with least privilege, timely offboarded when no longer needed, don’t feed data-hungry GenAI tools with sensitive data, etc. is critical to protect sensitive data from unauthorized third-party access.
Suspicious Activities
While Google audit logs capture activities performed by users that interact with Google Workspace and the data it stores, detecting suspicious activities could be a challenging task. Trying to detect anomalies like impossible travel logins, unexpected configuration changes, or unauthorized data access, while sifting through these logs manually or even in a SIEM can be overwhelming. The sheer volume of activity across the environment makes it hard to distinguish between harmless user behavior and genuine threats.
Valence addresses these challenges with a holistic approach that includes continuous configuration monitoring, proactive governance, and comprehensive risk remediation, empowering security teams to enforce critical policies such as MFA, manage user lifecycles and ensure timely offboarding, and protect sensitive data across Microsoft 365.
Real-World Example: Ateam’s Google Drive Misconfiguration
A well-known incident highlights the risks of Google Drive misconfigurations. Japanese game developer Ateam inadvertently exposed the personal data of nearly one million individuals—including customers, business partners, job applicants, and employees—for over six years. The issue stemmed from a misconfigured Google Drive setting that allowed anyone with a link to access sensitive files. This underscores how a seemingly minor misstep can lead to extensive data exposure, reinforcing the need for proactive tools like Valence to detect and remediate such risk before they cause harm.
How Valence Security Helps
Valence empowers security teams with the tools they need to identify, remediate, and continuously find and fix risks in Google Workspace. Whether you’re focused on Google Drive security, Google Workspace data loss prevention, or reducing the overall SaaS attack surface, Valence offers:
SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM)
Valence offers deep visibility into your Google Workspace environment. Security teams can:
- Audit and monitor sensitive Google Drive shares, user and admin settings, or risky Google Workspace integrations
- Identify misconfigurations, failed offboarding, data exposure risks and configuration drift over time away from policies
- Map security findings with industry standards like NIST, ISO 27001, and other frameworks
Through a "Remediation by Choice" framework, Valence empowers security with a wide range of flexible risk remediation options:
- Get step-by-step remediation instructions from within the Google Workspace admin console, or perform one-click remediations directly from the Valence platform
- Apply customizable automated workflows to remediate risks at scale, all while avoiding disruptions to business operations
- Engage business users through automated notifications in Slack or email, enabling them to address risks proactively, or provide more context
SaaS Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR)
Valence strengthens human and non-human identity security by detecting to threats across Google Workspace accounts:
- Detect suspicious activities, such as login attempts from unauthorized locations or sudden org-wide changes
- Gain deeper insights into user activities to strengthen overall security
- Protect against threats like account takeover, privilege escalation, and data exfiltration
