From Security Risks to a Unified Workspace

SEPA has partnered with HiView since 2023, leveraging ongoing monthly consulting (20 hours/month) with their dedicated specialist, Ricardo. Throughout the engagement, HiView has supported SEPA across a wide range of Google Workspace initiatives from enabling Gemini and implementing critical security features to troubleshooting complex email delivery issues and optimizing user licenses and groups.

Challenges:

SEPA faced several challenges within their Google Workspace environment:

1. Time and Scale: As a large organization, implementing improvements required significant time and coordination across departments.
2. User Training and Adoption: End users needed training to understand and adapt to the newly implemented security features, tools, and process enhancements.
3. Change Communication: SEPA needed a clear and effective way to communicate updates and changes to their staff to ensure smooth adoption.
4. Email Spoofing: The organization experienced recurring email spoofing issues, putting users at risk and requiring immediate investigation and mitigation.
5. Workspace Consolidation: The upcoming domain merge and data migration added complexity, requiring careful planning to avoid data loss, user disruption, or permission errors.

HiView’s Solution:

HiView Solutions implemented a structured and thorough approach to resolve SEPA’s security and operational challenges:

1. Security Investigation: Ricardo conducted an in-depth analysis of suspicious emails by reviewing message headers, sender details, and IP addresses to pinpoint the source of spoofing attempts.
2. Threat Mitigation: Using the insights gathered, he blocked malicious senders and implemented protections to prevent spoofed emails from reaching end-user accounts.
3. Google Support Escalation: To reinforce SEPA’s defenses, he escalated the issue to Google Support, ensuring that all findings and actions were validated and aligned with best-practice security standards.
4. Workspace Migration & Consolidation: HiView executed a single-phase, four-week migration plan to move 9 users and 2 Shared Drives (246 GB total) into sepapower.org. This included full project management, user communication, and change-management support to ensure minimal disruption.
5. Ongoing Guidance: HiView provided SEPA with best practices and recommendations for strengthening their Workspace environment, including improvements to email quarantine workflows, Drive data classification, MDM configurations, DLP rules, and Alert Center monitoring.

Results:

HiView’s efforts significantly reduced the volume of spoofing emails reaching SEPA’s end users, strengthening the organization’s security posture and minimizing data-leakage risks. The successful Workspace consolidation improved operational efficiency by unifying SEPA’s data, users, and resources into a single, streamlined domain. SEPA now operates with greater confidence in the security, stability, and long-term reliability of its Google Workspace environment.