GCP – Announcing Assured Controls and expanded Data Regions coverage for Google Workspace

As Google Workspace rapidly introduces new collaboration tools to help organizations embrace the Future of Work, we want to further empower our admins with the tools they need to control their data according to their organizational requirements and business goals. Helping admins achieve these information governance goals is a critical part of earning and maintaining customer trust, alongside our strong commitments to protecting privacy and upholding transparency. Today, we’re adding new information governance features to Google Workspace with the introduction of Assured Controls and enhancements to Data Regions, both rolling out in the coming weeks.

Assured Controls for Google Workspace

Assured Controls is a new add-on for Google Workspace that will allow organizations to precisely control cloud service provider access. The first feature of Assured Controls, Access Management, is rolling out in the coming weeks for the U.S. region. 

Access Management gives customers the ability to geographically limit Google staff support actions to U.S. Persons within our Support teams, an especially useful control for highly regulated industries such as the public sector. And unlike industry-specific cloud environments, customers don’t have to compromise on using the best of Google Workspace technology, like our advanced real-time collaboration, to have access to the powerful information governance capabilities available with Assured Controls. Moreover, customers can skip the added effort and complexity associated with managing a separate cloud environment. You can learn more about the Assured Controls add-on here. 

“At Verizon, we have strong information governance requirements that require us to restrict access to our data. With Assured Controls Verizon ensures that we comply with requirements around data that must remain located and accessible solely within the US.” —Greg Sly, Senior Vice President (SVP), Infrastructure and Platform Services, Verizon

Expanding Data Regions coverage

In order to meet organizational or compliance requirements, there are many customers who need to follow specific parameters regarding where their data is geographically located at rest. With Google Workspace’s Data Regions, customers can do just that. For select Google Workspace apps, customers can use geo-locational controls to dictate where covered data is located at rest.

Data Regions has been a staple security and compliance offering for years now, and we are constantly adding new covered data types and apps to give customers even deeper control. As part of today’s announcement, we’re rolling out extended Data Regions coverage to user indices of Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides for the U.S. data region, showing our continued investment in helping our customers meet their compliance goals.

We hope that these enhancements will help our customers in their information governance journey, as we always endeavor to give customers the tools they need to succeed in securing their organizations. On Wednesday March 3rd, we’ll be diving deeper into Google Workspace security in Google Cloud Security Talks. We look forward to providing a closer look at today’s launches and more ways that we’re helping our customers strengthen security. Sign up for the webinar here.