With Google Workspace embedded in Careem throughout its global offices, over 5,000 accounts have been deployed across 10 countries to allow teams to work together to great effect. Simplicity and effectiveness of tools bundled within Workspace have encouraged greater collaboration and improved interaction amongst teams. 

"This ease of access is why we invested in Workspace," says Zain. "Everything is very smooth now."

Through Google Drive, the international team can store, access, and manage files, collaborate in real time. It also enables real-time collaboration within the team and facilitates collaboration with external stakeholders through simplified live document sharing in Google Docs and Google Sheets.

"Google Workspace has been very high on cost effectiveness. We don’t need extra licenses when everything is there. Workspace, Drive, and even Google Meet, everything is there," says Zain. "Everyone works on online documents and it has been very smooth. And even with Slack we find Google Workspace integration is also very easy. It’s been easy to configure alerts to appear in Slack as well."

Ease of collaborative file sharing can raise questions around security. Careem is constantly managing adherence to GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS across varied regional obligations, making it a critical concern to always ensure data privacy is a top priority.

Along with establishing clear data classifications, Careem partnered with iSolution to enhance its file-sharing governance with Google Marketplace service BetterCloud File Governance. This enabled advanced mapping and automation of all file-sharing activities, current status, and tools to set rules and adjust settings, offering new levels of control over data and privacy risks.

During the initial rollout, BetterCloud's analysis of existing settings uncovered more than 100,000 files with external sharing. To date, through ongoing monitoring of share settings, Careem has unshared "almost 1.3 million files," according to Zain.

BetterCloud’s Workspace analysis helped to carefully process all necessary access adjustments and established better defaults for different types of risks across various organizational units. BetterCloud settings can also block certain files from being sent via email, with options to either stop the email from being sent or to just withhold the files in question.

"We can tell a user to remove sharing from a file after they complete a project, or I can go to an account and remove external sharing for specific emails or for domains," says Zain. "If a partnership with an organization ends, for example, we can find all instances of their domain in file sharing and set them for removal."

Careem under the leadership of Tarun Matai - Director of Cyber Security Engineering, is also testing automation options that revoke file-sharing status after set periods, with optional renewal settings where required. Blending automation, transparency for users, and manual settings helps to elevate default security without reducing the comfortable collaboration that has made Workspace so successful for the team.

With a widely distributed team working together across regions, Careem is seeing Gemini as an unlock to boost greater collaboration across its workforce. For its customer and administration teams, translation support, including translated captions in Google Meet, can help bring its teams closer as they work together in real time.

"We are also exploring security features in Gemini and how we can enhance data security using Gemini," says Zain. "We have heard good things about Code Assist for our developers too so we want to enable that for our tech team."

Zain says the entire Google Workspace transition has been a success for Careem, giving it the centralized system it needed, a positive experience for its teams, and a cost-effective overall solution.

"I've worked across different companies for 16 years across security and infrastructure," says Zain. "Google Workspace is effective and easy to manage for our enterprise. The features are amazing. The storage is amazing. The sharing is amazing. It’s been easy to integrate with. And, with BetterCloud added in as well, we have achieved the ROI we wanted to achieve."