Users are increasingly storing a lot of personal and work data in cloud services like Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive. The data created at workplace can be sensitive in terms of security and/or compliance, and hence needs to have a secure, controlled and compliant mechanism for access and collaboration using these cloud services.
With Drive, Google provides collaboration features to share and manage files in a user's Drive. One can go to the Google Drive web site and list, view and share files that are stored on Google Drive servers. But Google Drive lacks some key capabilities while addressing accessibility, security, collaboration and compliance in an enterprise environment. Here are a few examples:
- Think of a situation where a user visits a country where Google services are blocked. Now, if he or she wants to access even a tiny corporate presentation stored in Google Drive, he/she will not be able to do so.
- In case user wants to share a file and wants it to be editable only by a few select people, it's difficult to manage in Google Drive. Access rights, or enterprise-class access control in general, is hard to do with services like Google Drive or OneDrive.
- If a user (or his IT team) wants certain files to be restricted to specific IPs (e.g. office network), at specific places (e.g. branch offices) and specific times (e.g. working hours), then things becomes more complicated and are simply not possible with Google Drive.
- What if user wants to know who has accessed his file, from where and what type of operations were performed? Maintaining the complete history is also one of the important but missing features.
- Mobility and centralized management of files and folders with proper auditing is also important in enterprise file sharing. Things like encryption of data on mobile devices and being able to wipe data on mobile devices remotely and/or automatically based on a policy are not possible.
How does Vaultize take care of above issues?
With Vaultize, the enterprise IT administrator can apply various policies for access and collaboration of files stored in Google Drive. Administrators can apply policies to end-users and data for resolving the previously mentioned issues. Here's how Vaultize helps:
- Vaultize can be deployed as a private cloud, on-premise, as an appliance or in a wide choice of public cloud services (like AWS, Azure and Rackspace). So, Vaultize servers (or cloud) can be deployed where there are no restrictions on Google services and when the user visits a country with restricted access to Google Drive, she can still access her files through Vaultize Google Drive Connector and can also collaborate with her colleagues or partners. She can even touch up her presentation in Google Drive through Vaultize.
- User can upload, download, view, update or even trash a file stored in Google Drive using Vaultize mobile app seamlessly. Vaultize mobile apps provide a fully containerized environment for data, with a built-in document editor, end-to-end encryption of data, device-specific PIN protection and remote / automatic wiping capabilities. Vaultize also comes built-in with many data loss prevention (DLP) features.
- IT administrators and/or users can define various rights and permissions like view, download, share etc.
- Collaboration and sharing can also be controlled through Sharing and Access Control policies.
- Admins can apply Vaultize Mobile Content Management (MCM) policies to control access and usage on mobile devices.
- IT can generate various types of reports, alerts and perform audits using Vaultize centralized admin console.
The end user, who is accessing Google Drive through Vaultize, can:
- Securely access files from Google Drive. From the source till the time files are opened, the files are kept encrypted.
- Confidently access and collaborate with files in Google Drive on their mobile devices.
- Share and collaborate on files in Google Drive with internal or external users in an easy yet secured and managed way.
- Manage sharing and accessibility of the files in Google Drive seamlessly from anywhere in the world.
- Ease of use through many devices seamlessly.
What does it look like?
- Google Drive through Vaultize WebUI:
- Google Drive in Vaultize mobile app:
- Sharing of files / folders from Google Drive:
To know more about Anywhere Access to Google Drive and try it for free, please click here: https://www.vaultize.com/try-it-free.php.
This post is written by Anil Ph, the primary developer of Vaultize Google Drive Connector. He’s a Senior Software Engineer at Vaultize and works in our Pune India R&D Centre.