GCP – ChromeOS makes security simple for Block

Editor’s note: Today’s post is by Matthew Solly, Head of Corporate Security, and James Nettesheim Chief Information Security Officer at Block, the financial services and digital payments company. Block, made up of Square, Cash App, TIDAL, and TBD, chose ChromeOS devices for their outsourced customer support team.

When you work for a company that serves customers’ financial needs, data security and management are a top priority. We have to safely and securely connect our teams across the globe—in particular, the thousands of customer support agents in the United States and overseas.

ChromeOS streamlined operations with a secure, user-friendly, and quick-to-deploy operating system, perfect for our expanding business. Prior to deploying ChromeOS devices, our MacOS and Windows devices took several hours to provision and required a lot of IT support to onboard new employees. With ChromeOS, we can bring on a new hire across the world within minutes and configure devices remotely.

Automatic provisioning

The speed and simplicity of provisioning ChromeOS has made a huge impact on customer support. We need to be at 100% operational capacity to meet call demand and maintain customer service levels. With ChromeOS, deploying a device is simple and agents can be operational within minutes. Once we ship out ChromeOS devices, the customer support agents simply open the boxes, turn on the devices, and type in their username and password and can begin working.

Security is a top priority

We have teams around the world. With the Google Admin console, we can centrally manage devices and applications from anywhere. ChromeOS has security built-in with features like verified boot, sandboxing, and automatic updates to proactively prevent vulnerabilities. Additionally, Chrome Enterprise Core allows us to deploy and manage over 100 policies, including blocking risky extensions and managing browser updates. ChromeOS comprehensive monitoring provides full visibility into user activity, ensuring both legitimate and potentially malicious actions are identified and addressed. Together, ChromeOS device management and Chrome Enterprise significantly reduce the risk of malware attacks and other external threats.

Searching for paved roads

We want what we call “paved roads” for our people: easy ways to stay secure. It’s critical that the browser and identity provider work seamlessly together to ensure a secure online experience. We set policies in the Google Admin console to verify device ownership and complete device posture checks, such as user location and device health, to ensure security at the time of user authentication. The ChromeOS device trust connector integration with Okta, our identity management provider, lets us set device-assurance policies in Okta that leverage ChromeOS signals. We can now easily allow access to apps creating a seamless experience for our team, while IT can trust that devices and networks will remain secure.

Staying focused on serving customers

We never want customer service to be interrupted by security issues. ChromeOS is the perfect fit for our team—it’s intuitive and reduces downtime because updates happen in the background. Our customer support agents say ChromeOS is easy to use right out of the box which means they can spend more time helping customers instead of struggling with tech woes. Using ChromeOS and Chrome Enterprise together simplifies access to only necessary apps, boosting user productivity while maintaining security.

With ChromeOS, IT can easily onboard new joiners in minutes and keep these employees productive and secure out of the box without hours of provisioning. Additionally, Integrations with Okta make it even easier to maintain secure access to Okta-protected resources. ChromeOS is built to make security easy, and that’s how we view security at Block. ChromeOS is the perfect partner for us to secure our team and defend our data.