PEAR Health Labs activates secure, agile collaboration with Google Workspace

“Google Workspace has been essential to our business from both a security and operations standpoint, providing significant value that far outweighs the investment.”
— Matthew Walker, SVP Platform, PEAR Health Labs

Snapshot: With a small team of remote employees, health and fitness technology company PEAR Health Labs needs reliable, secure, and agile solutions to stay connected. With Google Workspace, the company:

• Consolidated its disparate productivity and collaboration tools

• Implemented built-in security features to automate authentication and safeguard company data

• Created a unified, frictionless user experience for its global team

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  The mission and the challenge

  PEAR Health Labs was founded with the idea that movement is medicine. Through our hyper-personalized, adaptive digital fitness and wellness coaching, we’re on a mission to help people and communities move smarter, get healthier, and live happier, more active lives. Our platform includes more than 9,500 on-demand fitness sessions and supports a network of over 27,000 gym and boutique studio locations.

  With a growing global team, we require agile tools to power our business, which is why we’ve relied on foundational Google Workspace tools, like Gmail and Docs, since our inception. But for document sharing and virtual meetings, we still used various other solutions to keep our team in sync. While these tools met our needs on a functional level, they were siloed and difficult to secure, and they couldn’t always keep pace with our rapid growth.

  That’s why we decided to consolidate our productivity tools under one roof with Workspace: We could retire redundant tools to drive business efficiencies while empowering secure, frictionless collaboration across geographies. Here’s how we use Workspace to unify our teams, tools, and security framework at PEAR Health Labs.

The switch to Google Workspace

Workspace powers all our internal collaboration at PEAR Health Labs, from hosting company-wide meetings to improving our products and services. With Google Calendar and Meet, we can easily schedule meetings with team members from California to New Zealand. We use Google Docs to work together on projects, such as security policy or product development documents, which makes it simple to iterate and make updates in real time. We house all of those files in Google Drive, so everyone can find what they need in shared folders with user-based permissions.

To safeguard our data, we use built-in data loss prevention (DLP) and access controls in Workspace to ensure only authorized users can open and share documents. DLP controls help enforce compliance and cultivate a security-conscious culture by prompting employees before sharing sensitive documents externally. We also rely on built-in context-aware access controls to help ensure that only the right people under the right conditions can access our data . These controls offer single sign-on, zero trust access, and robust user and device authentication, enabling secure remote work without the need for traditional VPNs. By switching on all of these features, we no longer need to deploy costly and complex security tools, worry about software vulnerabilities, or patch applications — we know that Workspace will handle it all for us with best-in-class security.

Workspace has also streamlined our operations by eliminating the need to maintain and monitor third-party app integrations. Nearly all of the apps we use support Gmail out of the box, so we can use Workspace as our primary identity provider for authentication workflows. This makes it very easy to set up and control integrations, and we can turn on extra layers of protection, such as two-factor authentication, without complex configuration. This helps ensure the safety of our employees, data, and company.

Looking ahead

Google Workspace has been essential to our business from both a security and operations standpoint, providing significant value that far outweighs the investment. By leveraging all the tools available to us within Workspace, we’ve reduced our licensing costs by thousands of dollars per month and saved on implementing more complex identity and security solutions. This is particularly impactful for smaller businesses like ours — we can choose tooling that integrates easily with Workspace and Gmail authentication, helping us move faster while staying secure.

Throughout the process, the Workspace team has been incredibly supportive, responding swiftly to help solve issues or answer questions. The platform overall has already created a better experience for our team members, and we’re excited to see how it will continue to help us grow at PEAR Health Labs.