Security is one of the main focal points for businesses and schools when storing data, and with the arrival of the Cloud, security has been one of the main concerns about storing sensitive information there. Google knows how important security is to these institutions which is why today, they’re announcing a new set of security features aimed at Google Apps customers, Google Drive for Work, and Google Drive for Education which are slated to roll out over the next few weeks. The new security features will allow for new ways to share data and files between specific organizations, as well as offer up new admin controls for IT professionals in the workspace.
As part of these new controls, Google is making it easier for admin and IT staff to handle passwords for specific employee/staff accounts. Then new setting will enable admin to allow employees secure access to reset their own passwords so the admin team doesn’t have to spend time doing it themselves. Google mentions that this function can also be turned off if any establishment would rather that password reset control remain with the admin team. Google is also making sharing more secure with the ability to configure sharing settings by specific departments within the admin console. This way businesses and education institutions can keep things confidential within one or two different departments but allow other departments to share everything else they need to whether it be internally or externally.
In addition to admin being able to configure who is capable of sharing what, they’re also going to be rolling out a series of customized alerts for Google Drive. With these new settings, admin can create specific alerts for certain types of files so they know when actions that are based on their configured parameters are taken. For example, if you have a file that isn’t supposed to be shared outside of the company you can set up alerts to know when someone shares sensitive data that is supposed to be kept confidential. Other actions like downloading, printing, and copying files with IRM (information rights management) can be disabled so that information stays where it’s supposed to.
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