Another day, another incremental Google Apps upgrade. This time, the search titan is upping its security game on its signature cloud productivity suite with the launch of OAuth support in a bunch of Google Apps APIs for secure data retrieval from the cloud. Here are some details.

The Google Apps team seems to be focusing efforts on security, with the official blog entry laying out their goal of becoming the most secure, reliable cloud environment out there. The new OAuth support extends to the provisioning, email migration, admin settings, calendar resource, email settings, and audit APIs.

To that end, Google says that the previous method of signing calls to Google Apps APIs with the administrator’s username and password (ClientLogin Authorization) isn’t the most secure. By using OAuth tokens for authentication instead, Google says administrators can reap the following benefits:

  • Security: OAuth tokens can be set to expire by a certain date, giving better control over secure access over ClientLogin.
  • Customization: Administrators can restrict the scope of data that can be retrieved – which means a token in a script that calls on email migration couldn’t be used to authenticate in the Google Apps provisioning API.
  • Open source: many developers are already familiar with the OAuth standard.

Again: incremental. But it could give a lot of Google Apps administrators the peace of mind that comes with better cloud security.

Sign up for The VAR Guy’s Weekly Newsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center; and via RSS; Facebook;   Identi.ca; Twitter and VARtweet.

Read More About This Topic

Share This Post

Leave a Comment

 

Blog-Powered Site By ContentRobot