A Practitioner’s Field Notes on Google Workspace’s Blind Spots

Google Workspace is an incredible platform. It’s the backbone of collaboration for millions of organizations, offering powerful tools for communication and productivity. Google has invested heavily in security, providing foundational controls like Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), Single Sign-On (SSO), and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). They give you the bricks, the mortar, and a solid foundation.

But they don’t give you the architectural blueprints. And if you’re not careful and deliberate about how you configure the platform, you can be left with more blind spots than you’d expect.

After years spent securing large Google Workspace environments, I’ve learned that the most significant risks aren’t necessarily from brute-force attacks on the perimeter. They’re found in the architectural blind spots—the subtle, often-overlooked gaps that arise from how the platform is used, configured, and integrated into the daily chaos of a modern business.

This isn't a critique of Google. It's a field guide for fellow security professionals on where to focus your attention beyond the defaults.

The Gaps in Identity and Access

Identity is the new perimeter, but that perimeter is far more porous than we’d like to admit. Even with strong authentication policies, several weaknesses persist.

• Over-privileged accounts are the default. When setting up new users or service accounts, the path of least resistance often involves granting broader permissions than necessary. A marketing automation tool might only need to read a specific inbox, but it gets full mail delegation rights. This "privilege creep" is rarely audited, creating a massive blast radius if a single account or its keys are compromised.
• API keys are ticking time bombs. JSON keys for service accounts are powerful credentials. If they’re stored insecurely in a git repository or a developer's home directory, they can be exfiltrated. Without a strict and automated rotation policy, a leaked key can provide an attacker with persistent, often undetected, access to your data for months or years.
• MFA has an asterisk. While essential, MFA isn't a silver bullet. Shared accounts, like support@ or billing@, create logistical challenges for enforcement. And while Google's native protections are good, they can be bypassed by sophisticated adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) phishing attacks that steal session cookies, rendering MFA moot.

Where Data Governance Breaks Down

Workspace’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies are a good start, but they primarily focus on what they can see. The real trouble starts when data leaves the managed environment.

• Shadow IT is a data-sharing nightmare. Employees, often with the best intentions, use personal Google accounts or unsanctioned third-party apps to get their work done. This creates unmanaged workflows completely outside your security team's visibility and control. Critical business data can end up in personal Drives, calendars, and third-party apps, where it lives on long after an employee leaves the company.
• Generative AI tools complicate data governance. The rapid proliferation of AI tools, both sanctioned and unsanctioned, creates new challenges. Employees might input sensitive company data into public AI models, leading to potential exposure. Even within enterprise AI platforms, ensuring that data used for training and inference adheres to governance policies, privacy regulations, and ethical guidelines is a complex and evolving task.
• Orphaned files and runaway sharing links. When an employee shares a file with an external collaborator and then leaves the company, who owns that data? That "orphaned" file might still be accessible to an external party indefinitely. Similarly, a public "share with link" for a sensitive document can spread far beyond its intended audience, evading any organizational DLP scans.

The Hidden Risks of the App Ecosystem

The Google Workspace Marketplace is a double-edged sword. It enables incredible customization and integration but also introduces a new attack surface that most organizations aren't equipped to manage.

• Unvetted apps are a Trojan horse. An employee can install a seemingly harmless app—a PDF converter or a diagramming tool—that requests sweeping permissions to their email, calendar, and files. Malicious or poorly coded apps can become a vector for data leakage or introduce vulnerabilities into your environment.
• Revocation isn't automatic. Here's a scenario we've seen play out: the security team identifies a risky application and uninstalls it from the organization. The problem? Uninstalling the app doesn't automatically revoke the OAuth tokens it was granted. The app's developer could retain access to your company's data until those tokens are manually and individually revoked—a tedious and often-overlooked step.
• Encrypted files bypass defenses. Threat actors know that password-protected ZIP files and encrypted documents are invisible to most security scanners. It's a simple and highly effective way to deliver malware or exfiltrate data, flying completely under the radar of Google's native filters.

The Unpatchable Vulnerability: The Human Element

Underpinning all these architectural issues is the one constant we can’t patch: people. Threat actors don’t just exploit software vulnerabilities; they exploit human psychology.

Cognitive biases are the attacker's best friend. A phishing email that perfectly mimics a DocuSign request doesn't need a zero-day exploit; it just needs to arrive when an employee is busy and expecting to sign a document. Our brains are wired for shortcuts, and that efficiency is a security risk.

This isn’t just about falling for scams. A well-meaning engineer might create an over-privileged service account to get a project shipped on time. A sales rep might share a folder with their personal account to access it on the go. These aren't malicious acts, but they create the very gaps attackers are looking for.

A More Pragmatic Path Forward

Closing these gaps requires a strategy that goes beyond just enabling more of Google's built-in controls. It requires a shift in perspective.

1. Harden authentication with phishing-resistance. Move beyond push notifications and OTPs. FIDO2-compliant hardware tokens and biometrics are the gold standard for resisting phishing and session hijacking attacks.
2. Strive for continuous visibility, not periodic audits. Annual or quarterly audits are too infrequent. You need real-time visibility into who has access to what, which third-party apps are in use, and where your sensitive data is flowing. Early detection shrinks the window of opportunity for an attacker.
3. Embrace Zero Trust (without the buzzwords). Forget the marketing hype. At its core, Zero Trust is about one thing: operating on a "default deny" principle. Assume no user or app is inherently trustworthy. Grant the absolute minimum level of privilege required for a task (least privilege) and verify every access request. This isn't just for networks; it's a critical mindset for your cloud workspace.
4. Supplement user education with automated guardrails. Security awareness training is important, but it's not enough. A distracted employee will always be a risk. The goal is to build a system where the secure path is also the easiest path, using automated controls to block risky actions or require justification for sensitive data access.

Finding the Right Tools for the Job

Manually implementing this strategy across a large Google Workspace environment is a monumental task. The native admin consoles, while powerful, weren't designed for the kind of deep, data-aware security posture management needed to close these architectural blind spots.

This is where a solution like Material Security comes in. Instead of just adding another layer at the perimeter, Material integrates directly with your Google Workspace environment to provide the visibility and control you’re missing. It can automatically discover and classify sensitive data, identify over-privileged accounts and risky third-party apps, and apply risk-based access controls to protect your most critical assets without disrupting workflows.

Securing your cloud workspace is an architectural challenge. By understanding the blind spots and adopting a data-centric security strategy, you can build a more resilient and defensible environment.