On Wed 1st October we held an essential session on Secure your business continuity with Google focusing on Google Lifeboat - a combination of existing Google products that can help organizations maintain operational resilience and secure communication during a cyber breach.
Cyber incidents like ransomware attacks and phishing are increasing in complexity and cost. Our speakers, Dean Paterek and Matt Stevens, highlighted how Google Lifeboat and its component products provide a robust, pre-planned strategy to defend against these threats and swiftly recover when they occur.
The Four Core Pillars of Google Lifeboat
The platform is not a one-size-fits-all product but a configurable solution built around four core components:
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What it is: A proactive agreement that provides an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for rapid incident response from Mandiant's global team of experts.
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Key Benefit: It provides pre-paid funds that can be used for security posture improvements, including tabletop exercises to train key stakeholders and test your organization’s response to a breach scenario. Mandiant also offers consulting for incident response, compromise assessment, and strategic security improvement.
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What it is: A hardened, secure environment for critical communication and collaboration.
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Key Benefit: In a crisis where your primary collaboration tools may be compromised, Google Workspace provides a secure, separate environment for internal and third-party communication, ensuring business continuity and effective crisis management.
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What it is: A secure, zero-trust method for accessing corporate applications and resources through the Chrome browser.
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Key Benefit: CEP enables secure access from any device (managed or unmanaged) by enforcing granular policy controls. This includes preventing data loss through features like blocking downloads, uploads, printing, and screenshots directly within the browser, and feeding security telemetry into your SIEM for improved threat detection.
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What it is: Google's secure-by-design operating system.
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Key Benefit: ChromeOS devices are highly secure out-of-the-box and are easy to manage and deploy quickly, making them ideal for rapid provisioning to employees in a recovery scenario—even across dispersed locations. The session highlighted the speed of deployment for uncompromised devices as a critical factor in recovering from a major incident.
Flexibility and the Wider Google Stack
A key takeaway was that Google Lifeboat is designed to be flexible. While Google Workspace is promoted for its separate identity management in a crisis, the platform can accommodate a "bring your own collaboration suite" approach, allowing organizations to use Microsoft 365 on ChromeOS with appropriate security policies in place (e.g., disabling local storage).
The session also touched on other integrated Google solutions, such as Cameyo (a virtual application delivery product) for streaming applications in a sandboxed environment from an infected system.
🙋 Got Questions? Let Us Know!
If you missed the session and have questions about any aspect, please comment below!
And let us know: Would you like to see more events like this focused on security and operational resilience in the ChromeOS environment? Your feedback helps us shape future community content!
