Google Workspace powers collaboration for over 6 million businesses worldwide. Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Meet: these tools have become the backbone of modern work.
But with that ubiquity comes risk.
In 2024, phishing was responsible for financially devastating data breaches at 9 out of 10 organizations. Identity-based attacks on Google Workspace increased by 127% year-over-year. And 83% of organizations reported insider threats, up from 60% the year before.
Google provides strong baseline security. But the shared responsibility model means your team is responsible for configurations, identities, and third-party integrations. That's where organizations struggle, and that's where attackers find their openings.
Perimeters was built to close those gaps.
Here's how we secure Google Workspace across every attack surface.
Before diving into solutions, let's understand the threat landscape. Google Workspace faces five primary security challenges that native tools alone can't fully address.
Employees connect third-party applications to Google Workspace every day. They authorize apps to access Gmail, Drive, and Calendar without IT approval. Each OAuth grant creates a potential backdoor into your environment.
The problem isn't that employees are malicious. They're trying to be productive. But that "helpful" AI writing tool or project management app might have excessive permissions, weak security practices, or even malicious intent.
Research shows that OAuth abuse is now the dominant attack vector against Google Workspace, with attackers deploying legitimate-appearing applications that gradually escalate permissions through incremental consent flows.
Google Workspace offers hundreds of security settings across the Admin console. MFA enforcement, sharing policies, API access controls, login challenges: the configuration surface is enormous.
Gartner estimates that 80% of enterprises experienced at least one cloud misconfiguration event in 2023. In Google Workspace, common misconfigurations include:
Each misconfiguration is an opportunity for attackers.
Your Google Workspace identities are your primary attack surface. Compromised credentials, dormant accounts, excessive privileges, and external collaborators all create risk.
Consider these statistics:
If you don't have visibility into your identities, you can't protect them.
Google Workspace makes collaboration easy. Sometimes too easy. External sharing links, public documents, and oversharing to collaborators create data exposure risks that are difficult to track manually.
External sharing abuse increased by 56% in 2025, with attackers creating legitimate-looking sharing configurations that persist for an average of 43 hours before detection.
Perhaps the biggest challenge is simply knowing what's happening in your environment. Without proper monitoring, security incidents go unnoticed. Unusual access patterns, excessive data downloads, and suspicious login locations fly under the radar.
Native Google Workspace logging exists, but turning raw logs into actionable security insights requires significant effort.
Google Workspace includes security features like the Security Center, Alert Center, and Admin console. These are valuable, but they have limitations:
Fragmented Visibility
Security information is spread across multiple consoles. You need to check different places for OAuth apps, configurations, identities, and logs.
Manual Investigation
Native tools surface alerts, but investigating and remediating issues requires manual work across multiple interfaces.
No Cross-SaaS Context
Google only sees Google. If employees are connecting the same risky application to both Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, native tools won't show that pattern.
Limited Automation
Google's built-in remediation capabilities are limited. Complex workflows require scripting or third-party tools.
No Vendor Risk Assessment
Google tells you which apps are connected, but not whether those vendors have good security practices or compliance certifications.
Perimeters complements Google's native security with unified visibility, automated remediation, and risk context that native tools can't provide.
Perimeters.io integrates directly with Google Workspace via API to provide comprehensive security across all five challenge areas. Here's how we protect your environment.
The moment you connect Perimeters to Google Workspace, we begin discovering every third-party application with OAuth access to your environment. This includes:
For each discovered application, Perimeters provides:
Vendor Risk Profile
We assess the security posture of connected vendors, including their compliance certifications, security practices, and any known incidents.
OAuth Scope Analysis
We show exactly what permissions each application has: read access to emails, write access to Drive, calendar management, and more. You'll immediately see which applications have excessive or risky scopes.
Usage Patterns
We track when applications were last used, by whom, and how frequently. Dormant applications with broad permissions are flagged as high risk.
One-Click Revocation
When you identify a risky application, you can revoke its access instantly through Perimeters, without navigating through multiple admin consoles.
Perimeters continuously audits your Google Workspace configuration against security best practices and compliance frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR.
We monitor hundreds of security parameters including:
Authentication Settings
Sharing and Collaboration
Admin and API Controls
Gmail Security
When Perimeters detects a misconfiguration, you get:
Perimeters provides complete visibility into Google Workspace identities, helping you identify and remediate identity risks before they become breaches.
MFA Enrollment Monitoring
Perimeters continuously track MFA enrollment across all users. You'll know immediately if accounts lack multi-factor authentication, so you can enforce compliance before attackers exploit the gap.
The Snowflake breach proved that missing MFA is catastrophic. Over 80% of compromised accounts in that incident lacked multi-factor authentication. Don't let that happen to your Google Workspace.
Dormant and Inactive Accounts
Accounts that haven't been used in months are security risks. They might belong to former employees, completed projects, or forgotten service accounts. Each one is a potential entry point for attackers.
Perimeters identifies dormant accounts and helps you deactivate or remove them systematically.
Privileged Account Management
Admin accounts require extra protection. Perimeters identifies:
External and Guest Accounts
Collaborators, contractors, and partners often have Google Workspace access. Perimeters tracks external accounts, their access levels, and their activity patterns. When a contractor's engagement ends, you'll know their access still exists.
Offboarding Assistance
When employees leave, their access should go with them. Perimeters identifies partially offboarded users who still have active OAuth tokens, group memberships, or shared access, even after their Google account is suspended.
Perimeters maps your Google Workspace security posture to major compliance frameworks, so you're always prepared for audits.
Supported Frameworks
Continuous Compliance Monitoring
Rather than scrambling before audits, Perimeters provides real-time compliance status. You'll see exactly which controls are satisfied and which have gaps.
Evidence Collection
When auditors ask for evidence, Perimeters provides documentation of your security configurations, remediation activities, and compliance posture over time.
Automated Remediation
Many compliance gaps can be fixed automatically. Perimeters' automated workflows remediate issues as they're detected, keeping you compliant without manual intervention.
Perimeters monitors Google Workspace activity logs and surfaces security-relevant events that require attention.
Suspicious Login Detection
Perimeters alerts on:
Privilege Changes
When user privileges change, you need to know. Perimeters alerts on:
Data Sharing Anomalies
Unusual sharing activity often indicates compromise or insider threat. Perimeters detects:
Configuration Changes
Security settings shouldn't change unexpectedly. Perimeters alerts when:
Visibility is only half the battle. What sets Perimeters apart is automated remediation.
For common issues, Perimeters offers one-click fixes. Revoke a risky OAuth application. Suspend a compromised account. Fix a misconfiguration. No hunting through admin consoles, just click and resolve.
For recurring issues, Perimeters lets you create automated workflows that execute every time a rule is triggered. For example:
After remediation, Perimeters validates that issues are actually fixed. You'll have confidence that your security posture is improved, not just that you clicked a button.
Perimeters integrates with Google Workspace in minutes, not weeks.
Step 1: Connect Your Google Workspace
Authorize Perimeters with read-only access to your Google Workspace environment. We use Google's official APIs and request only the scopes necessary for security monitoring.
Step 2: Automatic Discovery
Perimeters immediately begins discovering applications, identities, configurations, and activity. Within minutes, you'll have visibility into your entire Google Workspace environment.
Step 3: Prioritized Findings
We rank issues by severity and impact, so you know what to fix first. High-risk OAuth applications, missing MFA, and critical misconfigurations surface at the top.
Step 4: Remediate and Automate
Fix issues with quick actions, or set up automated workflows for ongoing protection. Perimeters handles the heavy lifting so your team can focus on strategic security work.
Organizations using Perimeters for Google Workspace security typically discover:
More importantly, they fix these issues in hours instead of weeks, with automated remediation doing the heavy lifting.
"I was looking for a solution that would give me a simple and effective way to discover and manage Shadow SaaS adoption. Thanks to Perimeters simple integration and clear UI, I was able to immediately gain full visibility. The built-in rules help me focus only on apps that present a risk, and the remediation tools save me time resolving discovered issues."
Marina Veksler
CISO, Match Retail
Google Workspace is essential for modern business. It's also a primary target for attackers.
Native security tools provide a foundation, but the shared responsibility model means your team must secure configurations, identities, and third-party integrations. That's a complex challenge that requires specialized tooling.
Perimeters.io gives you:
The result: comprehensive Google Workspace security in 30 minutes per week, not 30 hours.
Ready to secure your Google Workspace?
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Perimeters connects via Google's official APIs using OAuth authentication. We request read-only access to email metadata, directory information, and security configurations. The integration takes minutes and requires no agents or infrastructure changes.
Perimeters accesses email metadata (not content), directory information, OAuth application data, security configurations, and activity logs. We use this data to identify Shadow IT, misconfigurations, identity risks, and suspicious activity.
Yes. Perimeters integrates with Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Slack, GitHub, Atlassian products, and many other SaaS applications. This gives you unified visibility across your entire SaaS environment, not just Google Workspace.
