Protected Profiles: Chrome’s Secure Solution for Your Extended Workforce

For all its strengths, today’s digital enterprise comes with costs and complications that didn’t exist 10 years ago. Your markets are global, and your business is supported by a mix of full-time, freelance and subcontracted employees who might be located anywhere in the world. On top of that, most of these employees deliver their work via personal devices over which your organization has no control. In this fluid and unpredictable environment, you must keep your data secure while giving an expanding set of individuals the applications and resources they need to serve your business.

To answer the problem, Google extended their BeyondCorp Remote Access (a zero-trust security architecture that shifts access controls from the network perimeter to individual devices and users) through the incorporation of the Chrome browser. Today, the latest version of Google’s commercial zero-trust offering, BeyondCorp Enterprise, combined with the Chrome browser to offer the security and flexibility of the protected profile. The protected profile extends BeyondCorp’s zero-trust security so that your distributed workers and their unmanaged devices can access the corporate resources you deem necessary without jeopardizing the security of your data.

Why is the protected profile so important? Simply stated, doing business without it can be costly. For example, your frontline workers can’t necessarily share devices if their roles call for different applications. This puts you in the position of having to buy dozens or hundreds of separate devices that wouldn’t otherwise be necessary. 

Added to the cost is the complexity of managing an ever-changing roster of workers and their devices. IT administrators don’t necessarily have the expertise to install security software or agents, or to correctly set up a VPN.

Of course, the most important consideration is the security of your data. There will always be a significant risk in granting anyone—including full-time employees—unfettered access to a corporate network.

The protected profiles of BeyondCorp answer all these concerns. Protected profiles deploy your pre-approved access policies and security controls to unmanaged devices as if they were corporate-owned. By creating a profile and signing in through Chrome, your workers get only those resources necessary to do their jobs, and your enterprise stays safe from dangerous websites, ransomware, phishing, malware, account takeovers and data loss.

BeyondCorp, Chrome and protected profiles have Google’s zero-trust security technologies at their core. They are designed to protect your organization from even the most advanced attacks, allowing you to detect intrusions, minimize them and recover from them quickly.

And BeyondCorp’s protected profiles will not feel new to your workforce. More than 2 billion users worldwide rely on Chrome, and they can easily create a work profile to sit alongside their personal profiles.

BeyondCorp’s protected profiles give you a simple, elegant, agentless solution to the complexities of the modern workforce. For your workers, the protected profile offers easy, seamless access to the resources needed for the job. And for your admins, it provides unlimited granularity in creating policies, as well as unprecedented visibility into threats against your networks. It is the solution that finally makes your extended workforce a manageable one. 

Pythian is a Google Cloud Premier Partner and MSP, with service professionals trained and certified across multiple Google Cloud solutions. With deep expertise across Google Cloud, Google Workspace, Chrome OS and Chrome devices, Pythian uniquely understands the benefits of a modern cloud architecture. As an authorized Chrome Enterprise partner in North America, our Google Chrome experts can help with all your requirements, from procuring the right device to implementation, administration, security and support services. Learn about our Chrome Jumpstart packages today, or schedule a free 30-minute consultation with one of our Chrome services professionals.