“Cyber crime is only happening somewhere else, not in my company”. I have the feeling that a lot of companies think that way. Unfortunately, nothing is less true. In fact, 1 in every 4 companies will be a victim of data breach next year. One effective way of avoiding cyber attacks is to protect your office collaboration suite to the fullest. This is possible with advanced security features in the Security Center in Google Workspace Enterprise. This one of the main reasons why a lot of businesses are upgrading their Google Workspace licenses from Business to Enterprise.
Let’s start with taking a look at a couple of cyber crime statistics for you to consider:
- Cybercrime currently accounts for more than 50% of all crimes in the UK
- Malicious hackers are now attacking computers and networks at a rate of one attack in every 39 seconds
- 81% of all successful ransomware attacks happened in the enterprise world
- Mobile ransomware is skyrocketing, increasing at a rate of 34% every year
- 65% of the ransomware attacks were delivered by email
- Gmail gets attacked 10.000 times per second – luckily this emailing system has multiple very effective security layers that stop these attacks
Cyber attacks and data breaches are not only happening in mid- or smaller sized companies. Also large enterprises and very known, successful companies have been hit by cyber crime, which is costing them huge amounts of money and the trust of clients and users.
Telecom giant T-Mobile for example lost 20 million euro because of a data breach. The data breach of Uber affected 57 million people and caused Uber to pay 148 million euro to settle complaints of affected users. In the US, Equifax’ market value dropped by 15% after a large cyber attack on its company data that possibly contained sensitive information about 143 Million American consumers.
In Europe specifically, with GDPR privacy legislation in force since May 2018, companies who don’t protect (enough) their organisation and customer data, risk a lot. Fines related to data breaches can cost up to €10 million or 2% of the worldwide annual revenue of the prior financial year, whichever is higher.
Advanced Security in Google Workspace Enterprise
So how can you make sure that your organisation’s data, like your files and documents, are fully protected against such cyber attacks? Of course, as a Google Cloud Premier partner, we will advise you to use Google Workspace as your preferred collaboration office suite. With security measures in place at all layers, you’re standardly protected when using Google Workspace in your organisation.
But there is more: depending on the type of Google Workspace license you’re using in your company, there are a lot of optional security measures that you can put into place to keep your organisation more secure. The Google Workspace Enterprise license gives you the most peace of mind to avoid data breach nightmares. 
That’s why, mainly for larger companies with a lot of users, we strongly recommend to proactively upgrade to Google Workspace Enterprise. With this type of Google Workspace license you can proactively protect your company and monitor the attacks through the following security mechanisms:
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- Security dashboard: Get insights into external file sharing, visibility into spam and malware targeting users within your organisation, and metrics to demonstrate your security effectiveness in a single, comprehensive dashboard.
- Investigation tool: Identify, triage and take action on security and privacy issues in your domain. Perform organisation-wide bulk actions to delete malicious email. Examine file sharing to spot and stop potential data exfiltration. With this tool you can also execute upon the “right to be forgotten” rule of GDPR.
- Security health recommendations: Stay ahead of threats with the quick start guide, which provides recommended security settings and gives customised advice on security best practices for content, communication, mobility, and user security.
- Data loss prevention rules: With the data loss prevention rules in Gmail and Google Drive you can proactively make sure sensitive data doesn’t leave the company.
How Google Workspace Enterprise helps companies in specific industries
For companies in specific industries, like manufacturing, retail and e-commerce, the security measures in Google Workspace
Enterprise that I described above are even quite essential instead of optional in order to keep their data safe.
Most manufacturing companies have some sort of unique formula, a patent or at least some well kept secrets. For them it is extremely important to protect this with the highest security measures and to make sure this information never ever leaves the company. That’s why the Google Workspace Enterprise data loss prevention feature, amongst others, is a very important feature for companies operating in this industry.
Retail companies have an enormous amount of mobile workers that are not always aware of the potential cyber attacks. This insight makes it even more important to prevent and protect the company against cyber attacks. Data Loss Prevention is also for e-commerce companies a very important feature to make sure pricing and margin information doesn’t leave the company.
It’s obvious to say that companies in the finance industry are operating under very strict rules and regulations. If a company in this industry is exposed to a data breach, chances are that the company can just close down. That’s why they have to be very proactive to prevent cyber attacks and be aware of what’s going on in their Google Workspace environment.
What’s the price of Google Workspace Enterprise?
The price of Google Workspace Enterprise is €23.00 per user, which is very competitive when comparing it to the competition, which is Microsoft’s O365 E5 plan or Box Enterprise.
Taking the right security measures is important in order to fully protect your organisation against cyber attacks, which are costing companies a lot of money every day. To make sure your Google Workspace environment is fully protected, it’s recommended to upgrade your Google Workspace licenses to Enterprise and take advantage of all the security features that Google is offering.
To assess which Google Workspace license is right for your business, check out our blog post on this topic here.
