Google Workspace admins are getting two key security updates for Google Workspace designed to provide them with alerts whenever critical and sensitive changes are made to their organization’s configurations and to improve client-side encryption.
According to a Google blog, the company will notify admins of select changes made to their Google Workspace configurations when they are surfaced in the audit log. This new feature will help admins stay on top of high-risk changes to their environment and detect possible malicious actions that weaken the organization’s security posture.
Admins will receive an email notification with the key information about the event, and they can use Google Workspace’s security investigation tool to dig deeper into the incident.
According to the company, Workspace admins will receive alerts for these actions, and more will be included at a later date:
- Changes to the primary admin
- SSO profile added: when a third-party SSO profile has been added and enabled for your organization.
- SSO profile updated: when a third-party SSO profile has been updated for your organization.
- SSO profile deleted: when a third-party SSO profile has been deleted for your organization.
- Password reset for super admins: when a password was reset for a super admin account.
These alerts will be on by default, and they cannot be turned off. All Google Workspace customers and legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers will receive these alerts.
In addition to those critical alerts, Google is now allowing admins for select Workspace editions to update their client-side encryption configurations to include Drive for Desktop.
This allows users to synchronize their Google Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides files with Drive for Desktop on Windows & MacOS devices. Synced, encrypted files will appear as shortcuts on Windows and symbolic links on MacOS, according to the company’s blog.
The ability to synchronize encrypted files is available to all Google Workspace customers and legacy G Suite customers, while encrypting and uploading local files is available only to Google Workspace Enterprise Plus, Education Standard and Education Plus customers.
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