Understanding Google Workspace Structure from a Cloud Forensics Lens

In this new series, we'll be diving deep into investigation and forensics within Google Workspace (the Google ecosystem). So tighten your seatbelt—let's go!

When diving into cloud forensics—especially in Google Workspace—there’s a lot more to unravel than just user credentials or login timestamps. One of the most overlooked but crucial areas is how permissions are managed within the environment.

The Edition Problem: Why Your Investigation Might Come Up Empty

Before you go hunting through OUs and Groups, there's a more basic question that decides whether you'll find anything at all: what Workspace edition is this org actually on?

Two orgs can have identical OU structures and completely different forensic visibility — because visibility isn't set by structure, it's set by license.

Here's what actually changes between tiers:

• Starter / Essential — no Drive audit logging, no audit reports at all. Entire categories of evidence simply don't exist to find on this tier.

• Standard — full audit logging across services — this is the baseline every other article in this series assumes.

• Plus — everything in Standard, plus Vault and Device Management.

Forensic Tip: Check the edition before you check anything else. A blank search result on Standard means nothing happened. The same blank result on Starter might just mean nothing was ever logged.

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Now that you know what tier you're working with, let's break down two key building blocks of Google Workspace that matter a lot when you're investigating suspicious account behavior or responding to an incident:

👉 Organizational Units (OUs)

👉 Groups

Why OUs and Groups Matter in Forensics

Google Workspace has its own authentication and identity system, sure—but when you're trying to understand how and why a user had access to certain data or features, you need to look beyond just login logs.

That’s where Organizational Units (OUs) and Groups come in. These two are the backbone of how permissions are structured and managed in Workspace. And guess what? They can be used independently, so knowing how each works is essential for tracing how permissions are applied—or misapplied.

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Quick Primer: Footprint, Responsibility, and How We Got Here

Before we get into OUs and Groups, three quick things worth knowing about the platform itself — they don't show up in permission structures, but they shape what evidence you can expect to find and where.

Where your data actually lives.

By default, a new Google Workspace instance uses a globally distributed data region — your org's data could be sitting in any of Google's data centers across North America, South America, Europe, or Asia. You can lock it down to just the US or just Europe, but only if your license supports it. Either way, there's no functional difference in the product itself — this is a data-residency question, not a feature question.

Who's responsible for what.

Google uses the same shared-responsibility model you'd expect from any cloud provider.

The good news for DFIR:

Google gives you logging as soon as you're on the platform, regardless of which *aaS tier you're using. The catch: the more useful security and protection features — the stuff that actually helps you detect and prevent, not just investigate after the fact — only show up once you're using PaaS/SaaS-level features.

A short version of how we got here, because knowing the platform's age tells you how mature (or sparse) documentation and third-party tooling might be for a given feature:

·         👉 2006 — First released as Google Apps: Gmail, Talk, Calendar, Page Creator

·         👉 2012 — Google Vault launches

·         👉 2014 — Drive launches; enterprise offering renamed “Google for Work”

·         👉 2016 — Rebranded to G Suite

·         👉 2021 — Rebranded again to Google Workspace; Hangouts becomes Chat

None of this changes how you investigate — but it explains why you'll still see G Suite, Google Apps, and Workspace all floating around in older documentation, tickets, and Stack Overflow answers.

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The Edition Problem: Why Your Logging Might Not Exist

Here's the gap that actually matters: not every Google Workspace edition gives you the same evidence.

• Starter / Essential — limited logging on user and admin actions, no Drive logging at all, no audit reports, limited data protection.

• Standard — complete audit logging. This is the tier where real DFIR visibility starts.

• Plus — everything in Standard, plus Vault, device management (Business only), LDAP, and higher user/size limits.

Translation:

if you walk into an investigation and the org is on Starter or Essential, don't assume Drive activity logs were rotated out or deleted. They may never have existed in the first place — that tier doesn't generate them. Check the edition before you conclude anything about missing evidence.

(Education edition has its own separate tiering that's more generous at the lower end than the commercial editions — worth checking separately if you're investigating a school or university tenant.)

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Organizational Units (OUs): Think Department Bins

Let’s start with Organizational Units. Think of them like folders or containers that you put users into based on department, location, or job role. Every user account must belong to one—and only one—OU.

From an investigation perspective, this helps narrow things down:

If you know the user’s OU, you don’t have to search other units.

Also, OUs can be nested—meaning you can have child units inside parent ones. So a user could be in a sub-OU deep in the hierarchy, but they’ll still inherit permissions from the OUs above them. This inheritance is something to watch closely during an investigation.

Two practical things worth knowing when you're actually in the Admin Console:

you'll find the whole OU structure under Directory → Organizational Units — that's where you go to see the full parent/child hierarchy (it won't show you which users are in which OU, just the structure itself). And if a user account is created without an OU explicitly assigned, it doesn't end up ownerless — it drops into the org's default OU automatically.

One more inheritance nuance:

A child OU inherits its parent's settings by default, but the moment someone sets a custom setting directly on that child OU, it decouples from the parent for that setting — future changes to the parent won't retroactively touch it. If you're trying to explain why two OUs under the same parent behave differently, that's usually why.

Forensic Tip: OU Inheritance Can Create Hidden Access

If a user is in a deeply nested OU, don’t forget to trace all the inherited settings and permissions. You might find that access was granted not directly, but from higher up the chain

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One User, Many Groups — And Even More Permissions

Unlike OUs where a user can only belong to one, a single user account in Google Workspace can be part of multiple groups at the same time.

But here’s where things get interesting—and complicated:

Groups can contain other groups.

So if User A is in Group X, and Group X is inside Group Y, then User A indirectly inherits all permissions from Group Y too.

This is what we call inherited groups, and it’s an important concept for anyone doing incident response or auditing permissions.

Forensic Insight: Inherited Groups = Inherited Risk

Let’s say you have a group called "IT Users". It’s a member of both the "Log Access" and "Vault Access" groups. That means everyone in IT Users also inherits access to logs and vault data—even if that wasn’t the original intention.

This kind of setup is handy for streamlining permissions—but it can also accidentally over-provision users, which is something DFIR teams always need to watch out for.

Using Groups Smartly

Groups aren’t just for permissions. You can also use them for:

• Feature access control

• Mailing lists

• Managing shared resources (like calendars, drives, etc.)

Think of it like Microsoft’s Security Groups and Distribution Groups in Active Directory. In large organizations, using groups makes onboarding and permissioning way easier. You can just drop a new user into the right group and boom—they’ve got the correct access in seconds.

But this simplicity can be dangerous if you don’t track what each group actually allows.

Real-World Use: Google Drive Sharing Groups

Imagine this : You’ve got three groups set up for Google Drive sharing:

1. Internal Sharing Only

2. Sharing to Trusted Domains

3. Open Sharing (Anyone outside the org)

   
   

During a data breach, it’s so much easier to identify which group allowed risky sharing if these types of groups are clearly defined. You could simply yank a user out of the “Open Sharing” group, and the exfiltration risk goes down instantly.

This logic applies not just to Drive—but to all services in Google Workspace.

group Roles: Owner, Manager, Member

Every group in Workspace has three roles:

• Owner: Full control—can add/remove members, change settings, etc.

• Manager: Can manage members, sometimes limited in changing settings

• Member: Just a regular part of the group

Forensics Tip:

The group owner isn’t always an IT admin. It could be a team lead, project manager, or anyone else. That means non-IT staff could be controlling access to sensitive groups, so always check who owns what.

Heading: The Permission Matrix Groups Actually Control

Owner/Manager/Member tells you who has control — but Groups also let you control who can do what, independently for each action. Two axes:

• Who: Group Owners, Group Managers, Group Members, the whole organization, or anyone external to the organization.

• What: contact the owners, view members, view conversations, make posts, add new members.

Mix and match those and you get a permission matrix, not just a role. A group could let the whole org view posts but restrict adding new members to Owners only — or open posting to anyone external while locking down membership visibility. When you're investigating a group tied to an incident, check the actual matrix, not just who holds which role — the role tells you who's in charge, the matrix tells you what everyone else was actually allowed to do.

Heading: Forensic Insight: Dynamic Groups Add Members Without a Human Doing It

Not every group gets built by someone clicking “Add Member.” Google Workspace also supports dynamic groups, where membership is assigned automatically based on attributes already sitting in a user's account — department, job title, location, whatever the admin configured as the rule.

For an investigation, this matters because group membership history won't always trace back to a deliberate admin action. Someone could pick up group access — and whatever permissions ride along with it — just by having their job title changed, with nobody consciously deciding to grant them anything.

Using Admin Console to Inspect Groups

Google makes it a bit easier to investigate with features like Inspect Groups, available in the Admin Console. With this, you can:

• See all groups assigned to a user

• Know whether group membership is direct or inherited

• Check which users belong to a specific group

For example:You might find that Akash is directly added to the “Vault Access” group but indirectly added to the “IT Users” group through another group membership.

That tells you how permissions were layered onto Akash's account.

Feature Alert: Only in Enterprise Plus or Cloud Identity Premium

Here’s the catch:

This level of detail—especially Inspect Groups and dynamic visibility—requires either:

• Enterprise Plus edition of Google Workspace, or

• The Cloud Identity Premium Edition add-on

If you’re in a budget-conscious environment, the add-on gives you solid forensic capabilities without needing the full Enterprise tier.

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Final Thoughts: Groups = Power and Risk

Groups are incredibly powerful, but also easy to overlook during forensic reviews. Always:

• Map direct vs inherited permissions

• Watch for non-admin group owners

• Audit who’s in which group and why

• Use features like Inspect Groups if your license supports it

Getting this right can help you detect, contain, and respond to incidents faster and smarter.

----------------------------------------------Dean-----------------------------------------------------

Stay with me—things are going to get more interesting in the upcoming articles!