Google Unveils G Suite Security Center: Here's What You Need to Know -

Google has launched G Suite Security Center, a tool that combines security analytics and best practice recommendations to help organizations protect their sensitive data and end users against cyberattacks.

G Suite Security Center's features include:

Unified Dashboard: Provides insights into suspicious device activity, visibility into how spam and malware are targeting users within an organization and metrics to highlight security effectiveness.

Security Analytics: Enables administrators to examine security analytics to flag cyber threats.

Security Health Recommendations: Analyzes an organization's existing security posture and provides customized advice to safeguard data and users.

In addition, G Suite Security Center offers security insights into the following areas:

Authentication: Shows how many messages fail to meet authentication standards.

File Exposure: Displays which files have been shared outside an organization's domain and which shared files have triggered data loss prevention (DLP) rules.

Email Delivery: Shows the percentage of incoming messages that were accepted and helps administrators find out whether whitelisting allowed suspicious messages to get delivered.

Encryption: Enables administrators to ensure messages sent by an organization's domain are encrypted using TLS.

Spam and Malware Classification: Provides analysis of messages deemed to be spam, phishing, suspicious or containing malware.

User Perception: Allows administrators to determine whether users have tagged delivered messages as spam or phishing.

The Security Center is now accessible within G Suite's Admin console.

G Suite offers access to a variety of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools. It is used by more than 3.5 million organizations worldwide, according to Google.

Google Targets Cloud Security Upgrades

Google in September acquired California-based identity and access management (IAM) solutions company Bitium for an undisclosed sum. With the Bitium acquisition, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) enterprise customers can leverage Bitium's IAM and single sign-on (SSO) capabilities across their cloud and mobile environments, Google said in a prepared statement.

In August, Google released details about Titan, a purpose-built chip that establishes a "hardware root of trust" for GCP servers. Titan ensures a Google data center machine boots from a known good state using verifiable code, the company said. It also provides an audit trail of any changes done to a data center machine and chains, Google indicated, and signs audit logs to make them tamper-evident.

GCP ranks "a distant third" behind Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure in the cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and integrated IaaS and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) market, technology research firm Gartner indicated. However, Google recently has introduced more capabilities and partnerships that could help GCP gain ground on AWS and Azure in the foreseeable future.