Google suffers data breach in ongoing Salesforce data theft attacks

> Analysis revealed that data was retrieved by the threat actor during a small window of time before the access was cut off.

That's a pretty nonchalant way to say "they totally stole stuff before we knew what was going on or could stop them".

"store contact information and related notes for small and medium businesses"

Most likely translation: it affected the Google SMB sales team's Salesforce instance

> The data retrieved by the threat actor was confined to basic and largely publicly available business information

Which is to say, they took public _and_ private data and the private data is something we don't wish to publicly admit so probably not good.

From my experience with sales/PM people at google, they refuse to use internal tools and try to get Jira and other shit installed. Regardless of the tool quality, just because that's what they learned already.

This mostly didn't work out for them back in the day but in more recent times as more and more low quality middle level managers and execs get hired they manage to get approvals.

In my org a new VP demanded Jira instance within a month of joining the company and that it be used for technical project reporting.

Of course all the developers said fuck no to that so for a while some managers were trying to do two way sync between Jira and Buganizer. When I left it was mostly abandoned and full of tumbleweed...

Google has been replacing a lot of internal tools with janky cookie cutter Salesforce stuff. Part of the culture change I guess.

Custom internal tools at such companies are mostly restricted to the engineering org. Employees in sales, marketing, accounting etc. prefer to stick with the industry standard.

As long as they don't aim to make it a product developing a CRM is too expensive. Especially if one wants to include country specific requirements etc. Also training users on a custom software costs money and many people working in roles requiring CRM usage rotate relatively fast.

And for making it a product: It's a quite competed market, with Salesforce, SAP, Google, Microsoft, ... and it doesn't fit to Google's "you're on your own" approach, but requires consulting and integration services, as introducing a CRM to a company involves analysing the existing processes and then adapting processes to software capabilities and adapting software to processes. (Which both often fails ...)

If I had jumped through Google's hiring hoops, I wouldn't either. Of course, this could be solved with money.

Fwiw, I was hired by Google in 2015 to help answer questions like "if Google were to add a CRM to the GSuite portfolio, should they build one, buy one or partner with key players". My team's charter was to create business cases with various options and run them up to chain (at the time, Prabhakar was running product for "Google for Work"). On more than one occasion we presented cases with 3 year ROIs in the $xxxM range and were shot down every time with a "too small" comment. A couple years later, Google had partnered with Copper CRM and supported extension builds into Workspace/GSuite, but had also begun a major enterprise rationalization project to consolidate a multitude of Salesforce instances into a single one, at the same time as adopting standard enterprise features & processes of Anaplan.

This led to consolidation of a number of back office IT teams that ultimately ended up with far more enforcement clout than they'd historically had. By the time Ruth changed roles, most of the "normal" business processes had been fairly standardized. Fwiw, the Cloud instance of SFDC, which is by far the most complex & customized, has been in full use for almost five years now and is the canonical source of truth for sales data.

> they even have their own bugtracker because every other option just wouldn't cut it

Of all the things to NIH, this is one of the most defensible -- lots of bugtracker options just aren't very good.

iirc google cloud’s entire support ticket system is built on top of sf - it went down when saleforce had an outage a few years back

Salespeople are VERY familiar with Salesforce and are not very technical. Probably significantly increases onboarding and training time to have a weird new tool.

Easy to hire experienced salespeople and have them hit the ground fast if they use standard Salesforce conversion flows.

Google uses lots of non-Google solutions for many things —just imagine all the facilities stuff. But so does any software company, including Microsoft and Amazon.

That said, you can hire people for any purpose (specific roles) and you can build what you want. It’s more a question of whether it’s worth it to build such solutions, after all you have a main line of business to tend to. That’s to say even Google and Apple have so called “boring “ roles and there are lots of people who don’t see it that way and want to work doing those things.