Google's Work Insights lets you know when employees are abusing company policies

Google has unveiled two new tools to help businesses have more visibility of how their employees collaborate and use applications.

Work Insights is a tool that offers businesses insights into how its G Suite productivity group of apps is being used by employees, including how they're collaborating on projects. It will show stakeholders how app adoption changes over time, helping IT admins understand which applications people are using and when they start using them.

Work Insights will also help managers identify who may need extra training on specific apps, for example, if they're not using them in line with company policies. This is especially useful when understanding how well the business has evolved from using legacy applications to the cloud.

"For example, an admin can quickly surface the percentage of users on the Sales team that are working with the Marketing team to see patterns, like if they're working together in meetings or co-creating documents," Reena Nadkarni, group product manager of G Suite said. "This insight can help executives identify opportunities to strengthen collaboration and reduce siloes."

Google also revealed an investigation tool as part of its security centre suite of tools that adds integrated remediation to its prevention and detection capabilities. It allows admins to identify any suspicious activity happening on devices running G Suite for example if Google Drive or email is being misused.

If this is the case, the new investigation tool will allow administrators to remove access and delete malicious activities if need be.

"The investigation tool, with its simple UI, makes it easier for admins to identify threats without having to worry about analyzing logs which can be time-consuming and require complex scripting," Nadkarni added. "Powerful remediation controls enable admins to take action by scaling incident response across the entire domain with a few clicks."

Both features are somewhat similar to a set of features announced by Box earlier in the year, including its new Activity Stream tool that let users see what their colleagues are up to, and Box Shield, an investigation tool that's designed to prevent criminals or disgruntled employees from stealing company data.