How to Browse the Cloud Securely

Businesses are moving inexorably toward the cloud. Today, more than 94% of organizations with more than 1,000 employees have a portion of their workloads in the cloud. Even formerly recalcitrant industries, such as health care and finance, are finding cloud-based apps irresistible to speed innovation, reduce IT overhead and enable hybrid work.

However, cloud computing comes with its own risks. According to PwC, a “catastrophic cyberattack” was the number-one cybersecurity concern for nearly half of UK senior executives surveyed in 2023, while nearly two-thirds said they had not fully mitigated the cyber risks of digital transformation.

The same study found that mega-breaches are increasing in number, scale and cost. The corporate world is still struggling to cope with the use of personal devices by remote workers—and the accompanying increase in sophisticated cyber threats. 

Traditional security measures, such as virtual private networks (VPNs) and virtual desktop infrastructure, can be challenging to deploy and cumbersome to use. Truly effective cybersecurity must enable employees to do their jobs without excessive security protocols that encourage workarounds, while providing broad protection.

As business users spend more time on the web, “the browser has become elevated in its importance, because it is a conduit to cloud-based applications and information,” says Noriko Bouffard, Global Lead, Google Chrome Enterprise Customer Engineering.

In the new cybersecurity model, companies secure apps for their users through their browser, rather than through a network or device; browsers are easy to use and available on all types of devices and operating systems. Users who sign in on the specified browser are automatically subject to the company’s security policies. And IT administrators can easily implement, modify or test security measures from a centralized console.

Google’s own experience with a phishing incident in 2009 inspired it to move toward a least-privileged access security model, with the browser at its center. Google’s innovative cybersecurity solution became the foundation of what is now Chrome Enterprise and Chrome Enterprise Premium.

Chrome is the world’s most popular browser, protecting more than 5 billion people from malware, phishing and other dangers. Chrome Enterprise allows IT teams to manage browser policies, apps and extensions even if a workforce uses multiple operating systems and devices. Chrome Enterprise Premium adds security capabilities that prevent the sharing of sensitive data and control access to software-as-a-service and other web apps via Chrome.

Some IT departments are still loading up user devices with dozens of software agents focused on attack detection and response, data loss prevention and other cybersecurity realms, resulting in slower devices and problems with browser interoperability, notes Bouffard. By contrast, “I’ve heard customers describe Chrome as the agent of all agents, because it can manage any employee’s device by pushing agents out to them,” she says.

“A lot of forward-thinking leaders are looking to the browser as a platform to build a security architecture,” says Bouffard. “We’re working on enterprise browsers so our customers can leverage browsers safely and enable these new productivity models.”