Just to be clear I'm referring to monitoring traffic for security threats. Not for things like stealing source code or applying for jobs or whatever BS some emp

Just to be clear I'm referring to monitoring traffic for security threats. Not for things like stealing source code or applying for jobs or whatever BS some employers are paranoid about. The reason it's a cornerstone is because your clients, especially laptops, are huge gaping attack vectors. They visit other networks and browse the web. Even if they're browsing the web 100% of the time through a web proxy it's not going to catch everything. And it's for that same reason Google decided to shrink their perimeter. The distinction between their systems and someone else's is still maintained, but they've accepted and embraced the fact that the laptops used by their employees can and will get owned. So instead of acting as a bridge between the internet and internal squishy networks they sit out there with the internet. But I'm hardly doing the concept justice. In fact I'm probably hurting it more than helping it. If you haven't read it Google discusses the security concepts in a short paper you can get here: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43231.html http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43231.html