A different approach to patch management

Posted by Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security, Google Enterprise

Editors note:This post is part of a series that explores the top ten reasons why customers trust Google with their business data. A complete top ten list can be found here.

In the previous post in this series, we described how Google’s cloud data centers are designed and built to protect the data that customers store in Google Apps. One of the benefits of this architecture is that our customers don’t have to maintain the systems that run Google Apps, we do it for them. This reduces both costs and risks for our customers.

One of the risks organizations face comes from malicious software (a.k.a. “malware”) that attempts to exploit vulnerabilities in operating systems and applications. As vulnerabilities are exposed, technology vendors issue patches to fix them in what has become a seemingly never-ending routine. This can be costly and time consuming as it becomes a race to patch vulnerabilities before they’re exploited. When organizations support multiple versions and types of operating systems and applications, the challenges increase rapidly. Using Google Apps eliminates servers and reduces the number applications that need to be patched, which helps reduce risk.

Customers such as Brian Hobbs, IT Director for Hunter Douglas have this to say about patch management in Google Apps: “The company saves money but even more importantly, I save time in administering licenses, installations, security patches, and training.”

Many organizations that I talk to describe how they have developed a proficiency in deploying patches in their legacy environments. They’ve done so out of necessity - there really was no choice. But these proficiencies carry high costs in terms of human resources and 3rd party patch management systems. Google Apps allows organizations to change this mindset and reduce the number of IT resources and 3rd party systems dedicated to the patch management process.

Andrew Murrey, Vice President of IT Infrastructure at Cinram North America, had this comment: “we calculated that we could be saving 60% on email alone by moving to Google Apps for Business – a clear winner when it came to price per user – but we also knew we’d save serious time on IT management, freeing my team up to do more strategic work.”

IT security professionals often ask me how we address patching. In our data centers we take a different approach to patch management. Rather than many different types of systems, we have a very homogeneous architecture that allows us to be highly efficient in deploying patches. The data center machines are specifically designed and identically configured in ways that reduce the potential number of vulnerabilities within our systems compared to traditional on-premise, so called “private cloud” and hybrid technologies. When a patch is required, our architecture allows us to deploy it very quickly across all our systems. And it’s seamless and invisible to our customers, which allows them to take a different approach to patch management as well: one that reduces risk and cost.

In the next post in the series we’ll look deeper into strong authentication. In the meantime, for more information about the data protections in place for Google Apps, please visit our Google Apps Trust page.

Pure and proven cloud architecture

Posted by John Collins, Senior Global Trust PM, Google Apps

Editors note: This post is part of a series that explores the top ten reasons why customers trust Google with their business data. A complete top ten list can be found here.

When users think of Google Apps, they often think of their Gmail inboxes or collaborating on documents in real time with others. They often don’t think of what’s going on behind the scenes. Our cloud computing data centers offer our customers scalability and reliability across all of our products and websites, supporting millions of businesses on Google Apps and over 1 billion Internet searches every day. Our pure and proven cloud offers Apps customers significant data protections that would be hard for those customers to achieve on their own. It’s also the infrastructure that we use to run our own business.

As we’ve grown, we’ve developed an expertise around building data centers and protecting the data stored in them. The machines in the data centers that run our applications are built to our own specifications, including ones focused on security. The hardware is limited to what is necessary for the applications to run, and eliminates unnecessary components such as peripheral connectors or video cards. Similarly, the software that we run on the machines is a specialized, stripped-down version of the Linux operating system leaving out any unnecessary software code such as device drivers. This approach helps provide a computing environment that is less prone to vulnerabilities, compared to typical on-premise, so called “private cloud” or hybrid IT environments.

The services we offer are first and foremost Internet-based applications and platforms. We were born on the Internet, not on a single computer or server. We've published some of our core underlying technologies such as BigTable, the SPDY protocol, Google FIle System (GFS) and MapReduce. The last two of which have gone on to inspire Hadoop, the Apache open source framework that underpins many leading cloud or big data applications. Googlers Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle even wrote a mini-book about some of Google’s approaches, entitled “The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines”.

Lots of users leads to lots of network traffic that allows us some significant advantages in terms of security. For instance, the spam filtering in Gmail gains rapid visibility into emerging and evolving spam and virus threats, which in turn helps us to block the vast majority of them. This kind of large scale Internet infrastructure also typically provides better protection from denial of service type attacks. It also puts us in a position to spot malicious traffic and help protect users from malware.

Unprecedented global scale would not matter without the ability to reliably deliver business critical services. That is another powerful feature of Google’s technology and process discipline. We’ve built our platform to withstand expected hardware failure, relying on software and highly automated processes in order to support a 99.9% uptime SLA that has no maintenance window. In 2010 Gmail uptime was 99.984% and we are over 99.99% for the first half of 2011. This is an approach you fundamentally can’t take with traditional on premise IT systems.

Running data centers at this kind of scale takes energy, but as a carbon-neutral company we strive to use as little as possible - in fact, our facilities use half the energy of a typical data center. You can read more about our efficiency efforts and our approach to purchasing renewable energy.

In just the 4.5 years I’ve been at Google, I’ve seen quite a few generational changes in the kit we run, be it “simple” things like sheet metal for servers to something more complex like our motherboards, or something even more fluid and complicated like our various software layers. Through all those upgrades, build outs, and migrations, the focus on reliability remains. This is something that keeps me coming back to work day after day, and drives me to help others understand the value we can add to protecting their data and powering their businesses.

Powerful administration tools give you control of your data

Posted by Jaideep Mirchandani, Google Apps Product Manager & Parag Samdadiya, Google Apps Engineer

Editors note: This post is part of a series that explores the top ten reasons why customers trust Google with their business data. A complete top ten list can be found here.

One of the myths surrounding cloud computing is that you lose control of your data when it’s stored in the cloud. In fact, the opposite is true. When information is stored in Google Apps, administrators have access to management tools that give them the visibility and control they need without having to manage IT infrastructure. The Google Apps control panel offers a host of management tools, and over the past year alone we’ve added capabilities that let administrators manage multiple domains, configure specific administrative roles, and set user policies, to name a few (a complete list is here).

Starting today, the Google Apps control panel will also provide access to an audit log which permits an administrator to view details of administrative changes that have been made to their Google Apps domain. Some examples are:

• Changes made to users, aliases and organizations
• Changes made to various application settings in Gmail, Google Docs
• Changes made to mobile settings
• Changes in delegated administration

To save administrators time and make it easier for them to find reports, we’ve also moved the reporting section (including the audit log) to the top-level of the Control Panel. This section is now immediately visible within the Control Panel.

Debbie Farley, a Business Analyst with Caraustar, Inc. comments: “The Admin Audit capability provides our company with insight into key administrative tasks such as who is creating users and changing passwords. We also appreciate the new location of the Reports tab. It makes it easy to get to the audit log.”

David Cifuentes with Eforcers.com added, “With the Admin Audit feature we were able to gain visibility into changes that are taking place in the admin panel of our Google Apps domain, in a very easy and informative way. It even displays the changes that have happened months ago, letting us filter by action, date and administrator. The ability to export the information in a file was also helpful, in order for us to analyze the data deeper outside the panel.”

These reports are available today to users of Google Apps for Business, Education and Government. Together with other Google Apps APIs these tools give administrators the visibility and control they need to effectively manage their Google Apps instances.

Top ten reasons why customers trust Google Apps with their business data

Posted by Adam Swidler, Senior Manager, Google Apps Team



Over three million businesses have moved to Google Apps, and several factors have driven this transition. While improved productivity and cost savings have long been at the top of the list, more and more customers are choosing Apps for its security and reliability benefits. Our pure and proven cloud is designed to protect our users’ data and deliver reliability at levels that are very difficult or impossible for many organizations to achieve on their own. Even on-premises, so called “private cloud” and hybrid technologies are challenged to deliver the data protection and reliability that comes with Google Apps.



Here are the top 10 data protection and reliability advantages that we hear about most frequently from customers (in no particular order):



1. Powerful administration tools give you control of your data

When business data is stored in Google Apps, administrators have powerful tools to help them manage things like users, documents and services. Reports also provide visibility into how the applications are being used and what data is in them so that administrators have the control they need without having to maintain the infrastructure.



2. Pure and proven cloud architecture

Our datacenter server infrastructure is specifically designed and built for our applications and does not include unnecessary hardware or software code such as peripheral ports or device drivers. This reduces the number of potential vulnerabilities that could be targeted.



3. Patch management

Downloading, testing and deploying patches has become a significant pain for many IT departments. Google Apps reduces this pain because there are no servers for customers to patch. We manage the servers and take care of all updates.



4. Strong authentication

Google Apps includes 2-step verification for all user accounts - at no additional charge. Businesses and organizations can easily deploy an extra layer of protection for their user accounts using devices they already have. This makes strong authentication available to many organizations that did not have it before. Google Apps also integrates with existing Single Sign On (SSO) mechanisms via open standards.



5. Disaster recovery

Google Apps offers robust disaster recovery capabilities which are commonly measured by Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RTO measures how long before users can access systems in the event of a failure and RPO measures how much of a gap there is in the data when it is restored. Google Apps is designed with RTO and RPO goals of zero. Emails, documents and data are saved every few seconds and replicated in multiple data centers. This means that if one of our data centers becomes unavailable, we seamlessly switch the user to another data center and because it has been replicated there is no loss of data and users can continue working uninterrupted.



6. Third party verifications

Google Apps and our data centers are SSAE 16 Type II audited and have achieved the U.S. Federal Government’s FISMA certification. SSAE 16 is an auditing standard where a third party auditor evaluates the controls in place for numerous areas including physical and logical security, privacy, incident response and more. The Federal Information Security Management Act or FISMA is the law defining security requirements that must be met by all US Federal government information systems. While FISMA certification is required for U.S. Government agencies, it is also a strong validation in the private sector of the technologies and processes we use to protect the data in Google Apps.



7. Information security expertise

We employ an information security team of over 250 people with a wealth of expertise not found in most organizations. Many have advanced degrees and are thought leaders in information security. The security team regularly publishes research and contributes open source tools to the security community. They monitor our global network of datacenters and applications 24x7x365.25 (they don’t rest on leap years).



8. Secure connections for users

We automatically encrypt browser sessions for Google Apps users without the need for VPN’s or other potentially costly and cumbersome infrastructure. This helps protect your data as it travels between users’ browsers and our data centers.



9. High availability

Google Apps has zero maintenance windows or planned downtime. While we offer a 99.9% uptime SLA, Gmail exceeded this guarantee in 2010 and achieved 99.984% uptime. We did this while delivering more than 30 new features and adding tens of millions of users. The status of Google Apps is visible to administrators and users on our publicly available status dashboard.



10. Reduced risk of data breach

Google Apps allows users to work securely on their data wherever they are, using a wide range of devices. The data is stored centrally in Google’s cloud which greatly reduces the need for users to take their data with them using USB drives or similar devices, which can be easily lost or stolen. This can help reduce the risk of a data breach, something that is on the mind of many organizations these days.



Over three million businesses trust Google to protect the data they store in Google Apps and make it reliably accessible. Over the next few weeks we’re going to dive deeper into each one of these areas to provide more details why Google Apps customers trust us with their business data.