Cyber: Filling The Most Common Gaps In Google Workspace Security 2026

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Material Security builds on Google's foundation, providing visibility and context that Workspace lacks natively across the emails, files, and accounts within your environment.

Material's inbound 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 th

Source: The Hacker News