Beyond Backups: Using Google Workspace as a Crisis Management Environment

When a primary collaboration platform is unavailable – whether due to a major outage, cyber incident, ransomware event, or wider operational disruption – the immediate challenge is not just data recovery. It is the organisation’s ability to communicate, coordinate and make decisions safely.

In a crisis, core response teams need a secure, independent environment that is separate from production systems, free from dependency on existing identity infrastructure, and protected from potential compromise.

In this session, we’ll explore how Google Workspace can be configured as a dedicated Business Continuity and Crisis Management domain: a standalone, air-gapped collaboration environment that can sit in warm standby and be activated when it is needed most.

We’ll cover:

• Independent crisis collaboration: How a separate Google Workspace tenancy can provide email, Chat, Meet, Shared Drives and Sites outside the production environment.
• Warm standby access model: How key users can be pre-provisioned, with a small core team maintaining active access and wider crisis response users ready to be activated when required.
• Secure access and identity controls: Why unique credentials, suspended standby accounts, strong password policies and physical security keys for administrators can reduce dependency on compromised production systems.
• Crisis documentation and dashboards: How Shared Drives and Google Sites can provide protected access to incident response plans, escalation contacts, playbooks and clear action guidance for the first 30 minutes, first hour and first 24 hours of an incident.
• Rapid endpoint recovery: How ChromeOS Flex can help repurpose existing hardware into secure, cloud-based workstations if primary devices are unavailable, encrypted or compromised.
• Practical deployment: How Telana can help organisations design, configure and operationalise a crisis management environment in weeks, not months, alongside Microsoft 365 or an existing Google Workspace production environment.

This session is designed for IT leaders, operational resilience teams, cyber security stakeholders and business continuity professionals looking for a practical way to keep critical teams connected and coordinated during a major system failure.

Speaker:

• Sean McAndrew – Head of Digital Workplace, Telana.