Skyhigh and Google Drive for Work

Posted by Lauren Ellis on September 22nd, 2014

Google recently announced a new version of its popular file-sharing service, Google Drive for Work, that lets enterprise users securely collaborate in the cloud. This new offering builds on the success of Google Drive in the consumer world by adding advanced Audit APIs that allow enterprises to use Google Drive while ensuring compliance with internal policies and external regulatory requirements.

New APIs = Seamless Integration
Skyhigh for Google Drive Security leverages these new Audit APIs to provide organizations with greater security, visibility, and control in how files are shared. Specifically, Skyhigh seamlessly leverages these APIs to deliver data loss prevention (DLP), application auditing, data discovery, anomaly detection and mobile-to-cloud capabilities without changing the Google Drive experience users love.

This new API-based integration has become especially important with the advent of SSL pinning in the Google Chrome Browser and the increased complexity of asynchronous communication as Google Drive becomes more application rich.

Compliance in the Cloud
Skyhigh for Google Drive also allows organizations to extend their enterprise DLP initiatives to the cloud. Whether it’s Symantec or RSA, Skyhigh allows you to leverage your existing enterprise DLP policies, advanced fingerprinting, remediation, and workflow and apply them to Google Drive. Skyhigh also delivers closed-loop remediation by enforcing remediation actions (say, to quarantine a file or modify sharing permissions) within Google Drive on behalf of these policies.  All of this is made possible through the new Audit APIs available in Google Drive for Work.

Redundancy Can Introduce Risk and Increase Costs
Additionally, Skyhigh Discover lets you identify all of the cloud services in use across your organization to uncover consolidation and cost savings opportunities. On average, a typical enterprise has 24 different file sharing services in use by their employees. As enterprises begin to roll out Google Drive Security for Work, Skyhigh Discover enables them to guide and track the consolidation to Google Drive, thereby streamlining collaboration, and lowering cost and risk.


Author :
Lauren Ellis is a research analyst covering the technology industry’s top trends & topics, focusing on Cloud Security, Cloud Computing, Google Drive Security etc.,