Google enhances G Suite with new set of controls for IT professionals

Popular with over three million businesses, Google is reinforcing its G Suite services with new controls and tools for IT professionals.

With an aim to protect the business data on its platform, Google is now allowing administrators to force their users to provide physical security keys from companies such as Yubico to access their data. Google is also giving them the control over deployment of these keys and get usage reports.

Also, the company is enabling users with data loss prevention (DLP) service, not only for Gmail but also for Google Drive. With DLP for Drive, admins can set up rules to prevent employees from sharing sensitive data with outsiders. Using OCR, admins can put restrictions on viewing contents on documents as well as pictures.

“G Suite’s DLP protection goes beyond standard DLP with easy-to-configure rules and OCR recognition of content stored in images so admins can easily enforce policies and control how data is shared,” G Suite product manager Reena Nadkarni wrote in a blog post.

For improving the email security, G Suite now allows enterprises to bring their own certificates for S/MIMI encryption, and the company is also making it easier to search Gmail logs with BigQuery.
Moreover, enterprises that want to archive their emails outside of Gmail and Google Vault can easily integrate with third-party services like HP Autonomy and Veritas.

Though, Google is trying to ensure that users stick to its services, but Microsoft's Office 365 Business subscriptions already provides almost all these feature. Google launched the S/MIME encryption support yesterday, whereas Microsoft had announced the support in 2014. DLP is also available for several Office 365 apps, such as OneDrive for Business. In Office 365 also, admins can allow employees to use 2FA and also allow people to run queries on Exchange data in Power BI business intelligence tool and archive email data using third-party offerings.