If you are interested to know more about DLP practices in Google Workspace, you are either using Google Workspace already or want to dive into using this awesome collaboration suite.

What’s the most valuable resource in the world at the moment? Undoubtedly, it’s data. Every organization keeps wondering about the best ways to secure data and protect them from the reach of intruders.

You might be thinking that you are already secure with MDM policies, two-factor authentication, and encryption. Yes, no doubt they increase your security, but what about cases when a user shares sensitive information from Google Drive with an outsider or sends an email to a larger audience that shouldn’t have seen particular information? A simple user-level error would have catastrophic effects. That’s where Data Loss Prevention(DLP) for Google Workspace comes to the rescue. DLP is part of the Google Workspace Enterprise plan.

How does Google Workspace DLP work?

In short, Google workspace Data loss prevention provides you with a framework to detect, monitor, and create policies to act in an event of leakage of sensitive information. Whether the content is shared using Gmail or Google Drive, sensitive information is blocked from being shared with unauthorized parties.

Here’s a short video giving you a good overview:

Many organizations store sensitive information on Google Drive. Some examples of such information are:

1. Financial Data (Credit Card Numbers, Purchase Orders, Finance statements)
2. User’s Personally Identifiable Information(PII) – Social security numbers, Email address, Phone numbers, Age, Gender, Driver’s license,
3. Intellectual property

DLP for Google Drive:

If you are wondering about DLP detection in Google Drive, read further. We intend to educate you on the various capabilities of DLP for Drive and how it works.

DLP caters to Sheets, Docs and Slides as well as native file types like .doc, .pdf, .html, .png, .zip etc. Video and audio file types are not subject to scan at the moment.

The basic flow to set up DLP for Google Drive is as below:

1. First and foremost, you must analyze, strategize and conclude what should be protected. Google Workspace offers the capability to apply DLP rules to both “My Drive” and Shared Drives.
2. Once the DLP rules are created, it scans Drive content to detect violations and trigger incidents.
3. Each violation triggers an alert, and you get an alert every time.

As an admin, you can receive alerts regarding policy violations, check the legitimacy, and take appropriate actions to remediate the risk.

With Drive DLP for Workspace, you can use predefined content detectors, word lists, or regular expressions to set up compliance rules.

Google has also made it extremely easy to monitor the Drive Activity for DLP by introducing the Data protection insights report. The insight report also provides you with recommendations on enforcing specific rules. For example: If the report shows that a lot of personal data is shared externally, DLP recommends a rule to stop the external sharing of such data. Based on the recommendations, you can create whatever deems fit your requirements.

As an administrator, you can also apply labels based on automatically classifying all existing and new files on your Google Drive. Setting up labels or metadata can help you while defining the DLP policies.

Google Workspace DLP for Email:

Google Workspace allows you to scan both inbound and outbound email traffic and use predefined content detectors to locate sensitive data. These predefined content detectors have been designed specifically for many countries based on local data types.

If a particular email matches these content detectors, you can define actions like quarantine, modify or reject like any other standard content compliance rule in Gmail. Google Workspace also lets you use specific keywords or regular expressions to create robust compliance rules specific to your organizational needs.

You will also get the flexibility to set the below options:

1. Match minimum occurrences of the data type in an email before triggering the action.
2. Set the confidence threshold too high or medium based on your appetite to enforce the actions due to potential content matches.

You can always try this demo hosted on Google Cloud to get a feel of how DLP works.

Benefits of using Google Workspace DLP:

Below are some of the benefits of using DLP in Google Workspace:

1. Prevent Loss of data and unauthorized access to data.
2. Provides you insight and control of your organizational data.
3. Helps your IT Security team to stay on top with pre-defined automation.
4. Avoid compliance violations and risk of legal complications.

Setting a long-term strategy to protect your data is very important. If you haven’t paid attention until now, it’s the time! Hope our insights helped to expand your vision about the potential and advantages of implementing data loss prevention in Google Workspace. If you are looking for expert recommendations to implement DLP, feel free to get in touch with us.

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