In a modern enterprise environment, IT teams are fighting a two-front war to protect data. On one front is the operational nightmare of managing lifecycle data for thousands of users who join and leave the organization daily. On the other is the escalating threat landscape where ransomware no longer just targets on-premises servers but actively synchronizes malicious payloads directly into the cloud.
And there is a persistent myth in the enterprise that Cloud equals backup.
But for organizations running on Google Workspace, the reality is often a rude awakening. While Google guarantees the resilience of the application infrastructure by ensuring the servers are running and the lights are on, the integrity of the data residing on those servers remains solely the customer's responsibility.
Relying on the native trash folder or legal hold tools like Google Vault is no longer sufficient. To truly secure SaaS environments, organizations need a strategy that moves beyond manual management to a Zero Touch Protection posture. This means combining policy-driven automation with a security architecture built on immutability and logical air gapping.
Here’s how Rubrik bridges the gap between operational scale and data resilience, ensuring your Google Workspace data is not just backed up but truly resilient.
Introducing Data Resilience for Google Workspace
Securing Google Workspace requires a fundamental shift in strategy. Rubrik delivers immutable, air-gapped backups for Gmail and GDrive that survive tenant-wide compromises. This provides an isolated recovery point that survives even the most severe attacks, ensuring a seamless shift from disaster to operational recovery.
Rubrik protection for Google Workspace is built on four key pillars:
Logical Air Gap: Ensures total isolation of immutable backups from the primary Google tenant. Even if a Global Admin account is compromised, backup data remains untouchable and ready for recovery—effectively neutralizing the threat of a full tenant takeover.
High Fidelity Restore: Enables seamless, in-place restoration with 100% metadata preservation. By maintaining original folder structures and Access Control Lists (ACLs), Rubrik ensures recovered data is immediately usable, eliminating the need for manual reconfiguration or permission remapping, enabling in-place data restoration with 100% metadata preservation.
Policy-driven SLAs: Replaces manual scripting with automated, policy-based protection. By assigning SLAs at the Organizational Unit (OU) level, organizations can guarantee RPO and RTO requirements are met across diverse departments while reducing administrative overhead.
Seamless Offboarding: Protects institutional knowledge during employee exits. This workflow allows teams to effortlessly transfer or archive a former employee's data, preserving critical business intelligence without maintaining active (and costly) licenses.
These capabilities not only protect your data but also streamline management processes. Next, let’s explore the architecture, onboarding, backup, and recovery workflows to understand Rubrik protection for Google Workspace.
The Architecture of Resilience
The Rubrik solution comprises three distinct components that work in unison to ensure data is isolated from the primary environment:
Google Workspace Customer Tenant, which is the live production environment.
Rubrik Security Cloud (RSC) is the SaaS control plane for managing policies, monitoring data risk, and initiating recoveries. It unifies Google Workspace protection with enterprise data.
Rubrik Hosted Secure Resources is the vault. It includes a dedicated Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for compute, Key Management Services for encryption, and Cloud Storage for data.
Crucially, this architecture ensures immutability. Once data is written to Rubrik, it cannot be modified. Additionally, Rubrik provides security measures such as Retention Lock and Quorum Authorization to prevent insider threats to data policies.
How it works: Zero Touch Automation
The Rubrik architecture operates on a policy-driven engine that automates the entire lifecycle of data management. This process is divided into three distinct phases, ensuring security and efficiency at every stage.
Onboarding: A single-session setup is required to establish a secure handshake between RSC and Google Workspace. RSC generates two customer-specific technical strings: the AuthID (Service Account ID) and the Client Scope. The admin pastes these RSC-generated strings into the Google Workspace Admin Console to authorize Rubrik through Domain-wide delegation. This method avoids storing individual user credentials. It grants Rubrik authority rather than sharing a password, which is a key security principle of least privilege.
Upon validation, Rubrik provisions a customer-specific Google Project to ensure infrastructure isolation and eliminate API throttling. This process triggers the creation of required resources within the Rubrik GCP account in the specified region, including GKE, Google Key Management Services, and Google Cloud Storage.
Once the infrastructure is ready, RSC automatically discovers inventories and every supported Google Workspace object, including Gmail and Drive. Admins can optionally assign an SLA that defines the backup frequency and retention period to the entire workspace. The system leverages Auto Discovery to scan the Google Workspace directory. As soon as a new user is added to a specific Organization Unit in Google, Rubrik automatically detects them and begins backing up their data. This ensures no forgotten users and zero-touch compliance.
Intelligent Backup: Once the policy is active, backups occur automatically according to the defined RPO.
RSC leverages customer-specific secrets to authenticate with Google Workspace.
To execute a backup job, Rubrik Security Cloud spins up ephemeral pods within a secure GKE cluster. These stateless compute nodes are responsible for the heavy lifting of data transfer.
For email data, the system leverages the Gmail API to ingest messages, labels, and attachments with high fidelity. For files, the system utilizes the Google Drive API v3 to traverse folder hierarchies and capture file versions along with their associated Access Control Lists (ACLs).
The system indexes metadata to enable granular search capabilities, allowing admins to locate specific files across the entire environment.
This backed-up data is encrypted in transit and at rest using envelope encryption before being written to the isolated storage.
Upon completion of the backup tasks and when no further jobs are running, the GKE cluster automatically scales down. This dynamic resource management ensures the compute infrastructure is active only during processing windows, maintaining strict operational efficiency and reducing unnecessary overhead.
Rapid Recovery: Rubrik has designed Restore for speed and precision.
When a data loss event occurs, the administrator selects the required recovery point in RSC.
RSC leverages customer-specific secrets to authenticate with Google Workspace.
RSC instructs and sends commands to instantiate pods within the GKE cluster.
All recoverable items are discovered across the storage environment, so selecting a folder for restore will reveal all files contained within it. This is because Rubrik indexes metadata separately from the data payload, and browsing for a file is quick. You don't have to mount the backup image to see what is inside. This is what enables rapid RTO.
GKE decrypts and extracts data from Rubrik-hosted backups, and Rubrik then uses the Drive and Gmail APIs to reinject the data into the production environment. The restoration process preserves original metadata and permission settings, ensuring a seamless experience for the end user.
Upon completion of the recovery tasks and when no further jobs are running the GKE cluster automatically scales down.
Regain Control of Your Business-Critical Google Workspace Data
In today's data-driven world, relying solely on native tools can expose businesses to significant risks. Rubrik offers a powerful platform that effectively protects Google Workspace data. By integrating automated lifecycle management with a secure, air-gapped, and immutable architecture, Rubrik provides the robust framework necessary to ensure data resilience.
Ready to see it in action? Explore the Rubrik Protection for Google Workspace demo and learn how your organization can benefit!