Cybersecurity threats are increasingly sophisticated and pervasive. To adapt to these threats, businesses must prioritize creating robust security frameworks to protect their sensitive data and maintain trust with their clients. One very effective framework is the Zero Trust security model. This model assumes all users may be threats, including those inside the organization. Each user request is verified as though the request originated from an untrusted network.

Google Workspace provides powerful features to enable Zero Trust security. This article will guide you on how to enable Zero Trust security using Google Workspace.

The Core Principles of Zero Trust

1. Never Trust, Always Verify: Do not automatically trust any request for access; instead, verify every request as if it originated from an open network.
2. Least Privilege Access: Grant users only the access they need to perform their duties, and nothing more.
3. Micro-segmentation: Segment the network to limit lateral movement of potential threats.
4. Multi-factor Authentication (MFA): Use multiple pieces of evidence to verify the user's identity, significantly reducing the chance of unauthorized access.

Implementing Zero Trust within Google Workspace

1. Use Google's Context-Aware Access: Google Workspace offers Context-Aware Access (CAA) which allows you to create rules that adjust a user's access to apps based on their identity and the context of their request (like location, device security status, and IP address). Using this tool is a critical step in starting to implement the first principle of Zero Trust - never trust, always verify. To set it up, navigate to the Admin console, then go to Security > Context-Aware Access. Create access levels tailored to your organization's needs.
2. Implement Multi-factor Authentication (MFA): Google Workspace supports several forms of MFA, including Google Prompt, SMS codes, and physical security keys. Enforcing MFA ensures that even if a password is compromised, unauthorized users can’t easily gain access to your systems. Enable MFA by accessing Security > 2-Step Verification in the Google Admin console.
3. Apply Least Privilege Access Through Custom Admin Roles: Limit access to data and applications. Google Workspace allows for the creation of custom admin roles, enabling you to assign users only the permissions they require, and therefore minimizing potential damage when an account is compromised. Set up custom roles in the Admin console under Admin roles > Create a new role. Specify the exact privileges each role should have.
4. Leverage Advanced Protection Program (APP): Enroll users who have access to highly sensitive data in Google's Advanced Protection Program. This program provides Google's strongest security settings for safeguarding against phishing and account hijacking. It requires physical security keys for sign-in and limits third-party app access to Google Workspace data.
5. Data Encryption and Endpoint Management: Encrypt sensitive data both at rest and in transit. While Google Workspace automatically encrypts data at rest and in transit, you should also implement end-to-end encryption for sensitive communications. Manage the devices accessing your Google Workspace data through Google’s endpoint management. Be sure to enforce strong passwords and to wipe data from devices that are lost or belong to departing employees.
6. Regular Audits and Monitoring: Regularly audit and monitor access logs and user activities within your Google Workspace environment. Use the security center for Google Workspace to analyze security analytics and get insights into potential threats.

Key Takeaway

Implementing Zero Trust security with Google Workspace is a strategic step for bolstering your team’s cybersecurity defenses. Zero Trust is built on the principle of “never trust, always verify”. By ensuring least privilege access, businesses can significantly mitigate the risk of data breaches and cyber threats. Embrace the practices of Zero Trust to take a proactive stance in protecting your organization's future in the digital age.

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Crafting a compelling online presence for your business is crucial for success. The foundation of this presence? A well-designed website. Choosing the right website editor platform is an important first step. Do you want ease of use with simple components, or total customization abilities? This guide reviews top website editor platforms, and gives a spotlight to Webflow, the editor of choice at Elate for our website design and development team.

Understanding Your Needs

1. Ease of Use: How user-friendly is the platform?
2. Customization: Does it offer enough flexibility to create a unique website?
3. Features: What features are available, such as SEO tools, e-commerce functionality, and integrations?
4. Pricing: Is the pricing model sustainable for your budget in the long run?
5. Support: What level of customer support does the platform offer?

Top Website Editor Platforms

1. Webflow combines the ease of visual editing with the flexibility of custom code, making it a unique offering in the website editor space. It's designed for users who want complete control over the design without needing to write code—though knowledge of HTML and CSS will enhance user capabilities. Webflow also stands out for its robust CMS features, responsive design controls, and comprehensive SEO tools. Its client billing feature makes it an attractive option for freelancers and agencies. However, its learning curve can be steeper than other editors due to its advanced features.
2. WordPress is one of the most popular website editors, powering a significant portion of the web. It has an extensive plugin ecosystem. It can be overwhelming for beginners due to its complex interface and requirement for occasional manual maintenance.
3. Squarespace is celebrated for its ready-made templates and intuitive drag-and-drop interface, making it a favorite for creatives and people looking to design one-page sites. It offers a range of features, including e-commerce capabilities and has good customer support. While Squarespace is user-friendly, its customization options are limited compared to more flexible platforms.
4. Wix is another popular choice, with its extensive template library and powerful drag-and-drop editor. It's great for those who want to get a website up quickly without much fuss. Wix also offers a wide range of apps to add additional functionality. However, transitioning to another platform later can be challenging.

Takeaway

Selecting the best website editor platform depends on your specific needs, resources, and skill level. While WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix are all popular choices, Webflow stands out for those seeking a perfect blend of design freedom, functionality, and professional-grade features.

Happy building!

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Finding the right tools to enable effective project management is a challenge that all companies face at some point in their lifespan. Effective project management enables better collaboration, increased productivity, and more automated workflows.

There are so many software tools that claim to make project management easy for both managers and team members. We've researched and compiled a list of the top project management applications, with mid-sized businesses in mind. At Elate, we consistently prefer to use Linear, and this application topped our analysis for this exercise as well.

Our Top 3 Project Management Apps

First Place --- Linear stands out at the top of our list for several reasons. Linear simplifies project management without sacrificing depth in functionality, and is a favorite for engineers.

Linear tops our list for the following reasons:

• Scalability: As your business grows, Linear grows with you. It's built to accommodate increasing complexity, many teams, and a large volume of projects and issues. This makes it a long-term solution for businesses expecting to grow quickly.
• Integration Capabilities: Linear integrates seamlessly with many other tools that businesses rely on, such as Slack, GitHub, and Figma. This helps to unify an organization’s tech ecosystem and reduces the need to switch between apps. Elate offers a Linear integration for Google Chat, check it out here.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Linear’s costs are transparent and competitive with other project management apps.
• Sharable Views: Create filtered views of issues or projects that you can save and share with others in your workspace.

Second Place --- Asana is another strong contender, designed to facilitate task management, collaboration, and project tracking. It also has many integrations with other tools, and can scale well with growing companies. The interface is somewhat more intuitive to use initially compared to Linear, but Linear has more powerful functionality, such as sharable Views.

Third Place --- Trello uses a card-based system for organizing tasks and projects. It can be a good choice for teams that prefer a highly visual method of project management. It's very simple to use and also has a range of integrations to enhance its functionality. Trello is too simple for our purposes, however, and lacks the customization that Linear and Asana offer.

Our Runner Ups: Monday.com & Jira

Takeaway

When it comes to choosing the right project management app, it's important to consider scalability, integration capabilities, and cost-effectiveness. Linear excels in all these areas, making it a great choice for businesses to improve productivity and reduce expenses on their tech stack. It can be used by all teams, from engineering to product to marketing.

Why You Need Help with Email Security - Setup MTA-STS

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What is the Problem with Email Security?

When you send an email, you want it to be secure—meaning private and only readable by the intended recipient. A key part of this security involves a special file called mta-sts.txt, which tells other email servers how to securely connect to yours. This file should be located in a specific spot on your website (.well-known/mta-sts.txt) to ensure emails are encrypted in transit and safe from tampering.

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Why is This Hard for Businesses?

1. Conflicts with Website Hosting: Since your website service provider probably doesn't care about email, they probably don't support hosting this special email file.
2. Technical Complexity:
   • SSL/TLS Certificates: You need a secure connection to host this file, which means managing certificates that can be tricky to set up correctly.
   • Subdomains: If your business uses different subdomains, each one needs to be correctly configured, adding more complexity.
   • Constant Availability: The file has to be accessible around the clock from anywhere in the world, which requires robust server setup.
3. Security Risks:
   • If the file isn't set up right, your emails won't be secured, or may not even reach its destination.
4. Resource Intensive:
   • Smaller businesses might not have the staff or time to manage this, leading to potential security gaps or operational inefficiencies.

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How Does Elate Solve This for You?

Elate offers software (and support) to solve this for you:

• Easy Setup: You don't need to worry about web servers, certificates, or DNS settings. Elate does all of this for you.
• Always Compliant: Elate ensures your email security policies are up to date and follow best practices without you lifting a finger.
• Reliable Access: With servers around the globe, your MTA-STS file is always online and accessible, ensuring your emails are delivered securely.
• Automatic Updates: Elate keeps everything current, so you don't have to monitor or update anything manually.
• Enhanced Security: By managing this for you, Elate reduces the chance of mistakes that could leave your emails vulnerable.
• Cost-Effective: Instead of spending on infrastructure and staff to manage this, you get a professional service for a fraction of the cost.

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Real Benefits for Real Businesses

For example, a company that struggled with email delivery due to poor MTA-STS setup saw:

• A significant drop in email errors.
• No more downtime for their email security file.
• Their IT team could now work on other important projects.

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Conclusion

Securing your emails with MTA-STS is crucial but can be overwhelming to manage on your own. Elate's solution simplifies this process, making sure your business's email communications are secure without draining your resources. If you want peace of mind and to focus on your business rather than email security, consider partnering with Elate.

The MTA-STS policy file is a plain-text MTA-STS configuration file that is hosted on a domain’s web server under an HTTPS URL: It defines rules for establishing secure connections between mail servers, enforcing TLS encryption, and specifying actions to take if a secure connection cannot be established.

Let us handle this little detail for you: https://mta-sts.<domain>//.well-known/mta-sts.txt

Simplified Secure Email - No VPN or Portals

The Lowdown on MTA-STS

Remember when email was just a wild west of information flying around without much security? SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) was the sheriff back in 1982, but it wasn't until 1999 with STARTTLS that we got some encryption. But STARTTLS had its flaws - it was optional, leaving emails vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.

Enter MTA-STS (Mail Transfer Agent - Strict Transport Security). This is the new sheriff in town, making sure your emails travel over secure, encrypted connections. Here's why it's a game-changer:

• Authentication: MTA-STS ensures that the server you're connecting to is legit, no impostors allowed.
• Enforced Encryption: No more optional security. Your emails are encrypted or they're not sent.

Why You Need MTA-STS

• Prevent Eavesdropping: With MTA-STS, your emails stay private, reducing the risk of cybercriminals reading your sensitive info.
• Counter Downgrade Attacks: No more worries about attackers downgrading your secure connection to a non-secure one.

How Does It Work?

1. Policy File: Your domain hosts a policy file which tells other mail servers they must use TLS when sending you emails.
2. DNS Record: A simple TXT record in your DNS tells the world you're serious about security.

Elate's Game-Changing Services

With Elate, you don't need to be a tech wizard to secure your email communications. We built a back of house email security solution that makes it easy for your users and IT staff:

• One-Click Policy Updates: Manage your MTA-STS settings without diving into DNS configurations.
• Certificate Management: We handle your certificates so you don't have to worry about validity or expiration.
• Monitoring and Reporting: Get real-time insights into your email's security with TLS-RPT, spotting issues before they become problems.

Self-Serve or Managed Implementation

We rely on modes to ensure successful phased deployment of MTA-STS

• Off: Turns off MTA-STS if you need to.
• Testing: A safe mode to test your setup without rejecting emails.
• Enforce: Go all in with full security, rejecting any email not sent via a secure connection.

Set Up MTA-STS with Elate

Setting up can seem daunting, but with Elate:

• Quick Start: Book a demo to see how seamless it can be.
• Ongoing Support: We can manage everything from hosting your policy file to ensuring your connections are secure or you can do it with our software.

Why Bother?

Because in today's digital age, your email is as crucial as your front door. With Elate, secure your email communications with vendors, customers, and partners without the headache. Make the switch to enforced TLS encryption with MTA-STS and keep your communications safe from prying eyes.

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Ready to Secure Your Email? Let Elate take the reins, and you'll have one less thing to worry about. Secure, simple, and smart - that's email security with Elate.

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