Filling the Most Common Gaps in Google Workspace Security

Security teams at agile, fast-growing companies often have the same mandate: secure the business without slowing it down. Most teams inherit a tech stack optimized for breakneck growth, not resilience. In these environments, the security team is the helpdesk, the compliance expert, and the incident response team all rolled into one. Securing the cloud office in this scenario is all about finding leverage: identifying the strategic control points that drive the most resilience without adding operational overhead.

Google Workspace provides an excellent security foundation, but its native tooling has inherent limitations, and relying on the default configurations can cause headaches. To build a truly resilient program, there are some common-sense first steps teams can take to secure Workspace natively, before intelligently augmenting the platform where its capabilities fall short.

Secure Email: The Primary Attack Vector and Largest Archive

Email remains the most reliable target for attackers, as an initial attack method, as a vector to other connected apps and systems, and as a target for sensitive data. While Gmail's default security is solid at catching some threats, it often struggles with targeted threats and sophisticated social engineering and payload-less attacks.

The Gaps in Native Protection

• BEC and Targeted Spear Phishing: Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks often contain no malicious links or attachments, instead relying on social engineering that bypasses traditional defenses. An attacker impersonating a CEO asking for an urgent wire transfer is a classic example that Gmail's standard filters might not flag.
• Environmental Context: Google doesn't know who your VIPs are, which partners you work with, or how frequently you receive invoices from vendors. This lack of organizational context makes it difficult to flag subtle anomalies worth scrutinizing. An email from a known vendor sent to a new employee might be normal, but the same email sent to the CFO with a changed payment instruction is highly suspicious.
• Data Archive at Rest: For most companies, email is the largest repository of sensitive data. If an account is compromised, the attacker has access to years of confidential conversations, attachments, contracts, and more. Native Gmail security doesn't automatically classify or protect this data at rest.

How to Improve Gmail's Security Today

While Google can't provide all the capabilities of a modern email security platform, there are steps you can take to ensure your core Gmail configurations are as secure as possible.

1. Turn on Advanced Scanning: Enable Google's enhanced pre-delivery message scanning and malware protection to ensure you're making the most of Google's capabilities. This is found in the Admin Console under Apps > Google Workspace > Gmail > Safety.
2. Implement Basic Email Hygiene: Configure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. These protocols prove your emails are actually from you and are critical for preventing domain spoofing. Start with a p=none DMARC policy to monitor reports, then move to p=quarantine or p=reject as you gain confidence.
3. Automate Future Settings: Ensure the "Apply future recommended settings automatically" option is checked to stay current as Google rolls out more security updates. This reduces the manual overhead of keeping up with new security features.

Move Beyond Authentication to Manage Access

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is the single most important control you can implement today, but it's not a magic bullet. Your access control can't stop at the login page.

Too Many Windows and Side Doors

• Malicious OAuth Access: Compromised tokens, illicit consent grants, man-in-the-middle attacks, or simple misconfigurations can allow attackers access that appears perfectly legitimate to security tooling. A user might grant a seemingly harmless app access to their Google Drive, not realizing it's a data exfiltration tool.
• Legacy Access: Protocols like IMAP and POP don't natively support MFA, and App Passwords can be circumvented. These are often left enabled for older email clients or third-party integrations, creating a backdoor.
• Detection Gaps: Google can alert on suspicious sign-ins, but connecting that signal to other suspicious activity across the environment is a manual, time-consuming process for a lean team.

Harden Your Access Control Immediately

1. Enforce Strong MFA: Not all MFA is created equal. At the very least, disable SMS or phone calls as MFA authentication methods. Ideally, adopt phishing-resistant methods like physical security keys (e.g., Yubikey) or app-based authenticators. You can set this as a mandatory requirement in the Admin Console under Security > Authentication > 2-Step Verification.
2. Disable Legacy Protocols: Turn off POP and IMAP access for all users within the Gmail settings. This closes a common, often-overlooked attack vector. You can do this at the organizational unit level.
3. Deny by Default for OAuth: Require users to request access to unconfigured third-party apps rather than granting access by default. In the Admin Console, go to Security > API Controls > Manage third-party app access and set your policy to "Allow users to access any app" or "Allow users to access any app with verification" but monitor closely. Better yet, create an allowlist of approved apps.

The Next Steps to Proactive, Modern Security

A properly-configured Google Workspace offers a solid foundation for securing a fast-growing company. But as your company grows, your attack surface grows with it. For lean security teams who need to maximize their efficiency and their effectiveness, the end goal isn't just to have the right settings; it's to have visibility across all of Google Workspace, with detection and response capabilities to detect subtle signs of compromise if an account is breached.

Third-party platforms build on Google's foundation, providing visibility and context that Workspace lacks natively across the emails, files, and accounts within your environment. For example, platforms like Material Security offer:

• Advanced Email Protection: Combines threat research with AI, user report automation, and custom detection rules to provide multi-layered coverage to catch and remediate sophisticated threats. Granular automated remediations protect the entire organization from the first detection or user report, and automatically triage and respond to user-reported phishing.
• Context-Aware Account Security: A richer set of signals across the entire cloud office enables detection of account takeovers early. This includes monitoring all activity across the cloud office, including suspicious logins, unusual data retrieval patterns and file-sharing behavior, password resets, out-of-policy forwarding rules, and much more.
• Data Discovery and Protection: Automatically detects and classifies sensitive and confidential data in Google Drive, and enforces file-sharing and data access policies without slowing down collaboration. Risky sharing of sensitive files is flagged, and the system works with each user to self-heal or justify potentially risky sharing before revoking risky access.

How Secure is Your Workspace?

Google Workspace security spans so many domains that it can be difficult to maintain a complete picture of your posture, and this only gets harder as your organization scales and your Workspace evolves. That's why many security vendors offer free assessment tools. A quick, 5-minute assessment can provide a solid baseline and actionable recommendations to improve your posture.

The key is to start with the native controls you can implement today. Harden your email, lock down access, and establish a baseline. Then, evaluate where the gaps remain that are too costly or complex for your team to manage manually. The goal is to build a resilient security program that supports, rather than hinders, business growth.