Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365 audit: what changes and what stays the same
By Kike Gandia · Co-Founder & CEO, OSCP
Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 solve the same problem —email, identity and collaboration in the cloud— but with different architectures. Auditing one or the other shares principles, but the specific vectors and tools change. This guide explains the differences so you know what to expect from each audit.
What both audits share
In both cases, the audit focuses on identity (MFA, least privilege, admins), third-party app control (OAuth), file sharing, persistence via mail rules and detection capability. The offensive approach —thinking like an attacker and chaining vectors— is identical, as is the use of the CIS Benchmarks as a framework.
Identity: Entra ID vs Google Identity
Microsoft 365 relies on Entra ID (Azure AD), with conditional access, PIM and app registrations/service principals. Google Workspace uses its own identity with Context-Aware Access and domain-wide delegation. The concepts are analogous, but the failure points and audit tools differ.
Platform-specific vectors
In Microsoft 365, the standouts are AiTM phishing with token theft, illicit app consent and Entra ID abuse. In Google Workspace, OAuth consent phishing and, above all, domain-wide delegation (DeleFriend), which allows impersonating any user from GCP. Each platform has its signature vector.
How to choose and what to ask for
If your company uses only one of the two, audit that one. If you use both (increasingly common), it's advisable to audit both and, above all, their integration points. In any case, demand an executive and technical report, a map of apps and permissions, and a hardening checklist based on the corresponding platform's CIS Benchmark.
What gets reviewed on each platform, area by area
The principles are the same, but the places where each question is answered are not. This is the practical mapping between the two audits.
| Area | Google Workspace | Microsoft 365 |
|---|---|---|
| Identity | Google Identity, organizational units, Context-Aware Access | Entra ID, conditional access, per-group policies |
| Second factor | 2SV, security keys, Advanced Protection Program | MFA, authentication strengths, passkeys |
| Administrative privilege | Super admins and delegated roles, no native temporary grant | Entra roles with PIM and just-in-time activation |
| Third-party apps | API access control, allowlist, unverified apps | User consent, app registrations and service principals |
| Cross-service impersonation | Domain-wide delegation over Google Cloud service accounts | Graph application permissions with admin consent |
| Gmail rules and filters, verified addresses, mailbox delegation | Inbox rules, external forwarding, mailbox permissions | |
| Files | Public links, shared drives, Drive DLP | External and anonymous sharing in SharePoint and OneDrive |
| Logging | Admin audit logs and the investigation tool | Unified audit log and Entra logs |
| Reference framework | CIS Google Workspace Benchmark | CIS Microsoft 365 Benchmark |
The row hiding the biggest difference is administrative privilege: Microsoft offers native temporary grants and Google does not, so in Workspace that control has to be held up by process and alerts.
The blind spot: mixed environments
It is increasingly common to find both platforms coexisting in the same company: an acquisition that brought Microsoft 365 while one division stays on Workspace, or a long-standing Workspace alongside a Microsoft directory holding up the Windows estate. That is where the problems neither audit finds on its own appear.
The same person has two identities and usually only one is hardened. Offboarding is done on one platform and forgotten on the other, so the dead account is still alive somewhere. An application federated against the weaker environment ends up granting access to data living in the stronger one. And above all, nobody owns the boundary: each team assumes the other covers it.
That is why an audit in a mixed environment always starts with the same unglamorous exercise: mapping which identity is authoritative for each application and each dataset, and checking that the account lifecycle actually runs on both.
FAQ
Is Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace more secure?
Neither is inherently more secure: both have a solid baseline and incidents almost always come from the customer's configuration, not the platform. What makes the difference is how well your tenant is hardened and audited.
Can you audit both environments at once?
Yes. We apply the same offensive methodology to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, and we pay special attention to the integrations between them and with the cloud (GCP/Azure) when they coexist.
If I can only audit one, which do I choose?
The one acting as the identity provider for everything else, even if it is not where the main mailbox lives. It has the larger blast radius: compromising it propagates access to everything federated, while compromising the other usually stays within its own perimeter.
What do you need from us to get started?
A read-only role in each environment, the list of domains, an inventory of integrations and federated applications, and knowing who holds administrative privileges today. With that, the whole review can be done without touching your configuration or asking for privileged credentials.
Does it disrupt users’ work?
Configuration and log review goes unnoticed. Any active test —validating a policy, demonstrating an escalation path, a phishing simulation— is agreed in writing, with a defined scope and window, before it runs.
What if we also use Google Cloud or Azure?
They fall in scope if they share identities with the productivity platform, and they usually do. That is precisely where the escalation paths neither audit finds on its own show up: from mail to infrastructure through service accounts, delegations and application permissions.