Ajax Systems enhances productivity and strengthens security with Google Workspace

• 3,600+ phishing attempts blocked annually

• 90% of spam filtered automatically

• 80% increase in speed of incident detection and 50% decrease in response time thanks to automated alerts

• 50% of Drive documents auto-tagged by security level with Gemini in one month, a total that grew by 1.5x per month

While Ajax Systems has been in business for 14 years, expanding steadily since its founding, in the past few years it began to grow exponentially — and outgrow its homegrown tools. That’s when Nataliia Kondratenko decided they needed an enterprise platform for communicating and collaborative workflows.

"We never considered any solution other than Google Workspace," she recounts. "In addition to the airtight security it offers, Google Workspace apps like Google Meet, Calendar, and Gmail are not only interconnected, which makes them efficient, they're intuitive, which flattens the learning curve and makes onboarding new team members go more quickly."

In fact, many Ajax Systems employees already used them in their personal lives, and the transition from personal to corporate use was straightforward for even their least technical team members.

From an initial implementation with 300 licenses in 2019, Ajax Systems has scaled up to more than 3,160 Workspace users across their Ukrainian headquarters, Turkish production facility, and satellite offices in Europe and the Americas — 10 times the number of licenses they began with, representing more than 75% of their total workforce and their entire office-based team.

The ability to work concurrently in Google Docs and Sheets offered substantial benefits; the scalability Workspace provides supported Ajax Systems’ rapid growth. And the platform’s intrinsic security features and administrative tools for IT managers aligned perfectly with the needs of a security-conscious company.

Built-in AI-powered phishing and malware protection in Gmail is helping Ajax Systems automatically block more than 3,600 email-based threats every year, reducing the total to just one or two per month. In addition, 90% of spam is filtered out automatically, and auto-scanning Gmail attachments diminished the risk of virus infection by 80% in the past year. 

"This not only keeps our internal systems safe, it improves productivity because our team can focus on their work rather than weeding through junk mail or reporting suspicious links," observes Anton Hliebov, the cybersecurity specialist who leads Ajax Systems’ Incident Response Team. "And it lets our IT crew concentrate on keeping our digital infrastructure running smoothly rather than fixing quarantined computers compromised by phishing or malware attacks."

In addition, the automated banners that Gmail displays when there are external email addresses among the recipients helps the Ajax Systems IT team keep confidential information safe. But it’s the centralized interface of the Google Admin console that saves the IT team the most time and effort when managing access privileges for shared documents and drives, investigating security incidents, and resolving IT issues. 

"Automated alerts generated by the Admin console have accelerated incident detection by 80% since last year, cutting analysis time from an average of three hours to just 45 minutes per incident, while automated daily reports on suspicious activity have improved potential incident detection by 50%, further enhancing our ability to secure our data," Anton Hliebov reports. 

The Admin console also simplifies essential security measures such as resetting passwords, managing multi-factor authentication, configuring mobile app distribution, detecting the use of unauthorized applications, and assigning and controlling access privileges to documents, folders, and drives.

This leaves the IT team with more time to respond to incidents that do occur, and more bandwidth for implementing risk prevention measures. Centralizing the management of the entire Workspace platform has also reduced IT’s response time to service requests and incident reports by 50%.

For Nataliia Kondratenko, who’s responsible for cybersecurity audits, Workspace certification for internationally recognized security and privacy standards — including ISO 27001 and SOC 1, 2, and 3 — means Ajax Systems’ business partners and suppliers feel comfortable doing business with the company. "As a company whose reputation is built on ensuring others’ security, it’s essential that our own systems meet the highest security standards, and Workspace enables us to do so," she explains.

Ajax Systems uses AI classification and data loss prevention controls to automate the identification, classification, and labeling of files in Drive based on predetermined sensitivity criteria. The privacy-preserving AI model can now independently and continuously assess the content of new and existing documents and assign the appropriate labels.

"Automated categorization has not only sped up the process, it’s minimized classification errors that people might make, thereby strengthening our data loss prevention efforts," comments Anton Hliebov, who estimates that in just one month, AI classification automatically tagged 50% of all Ajax Systems’ documents, a number that increased 1.5x per month until all documents had been labeled.