Google Drive Introduces New Features for Enterprises

Across the Google cloud ecosystem lies one of the most crucial organizational storage viz. Drive. Google Drive is the major application component of Google Workspace – which is primarily a collection of multiple applications used for enhancing productivity and collaboration across the enterprise. Google Drive is primarily a platform to store all of an organization and individual data within a single place. This data can be accessed securely in a controlled manner across multiple platforms.

In March 2017, at the Google Next conference, Google announced new improvements and enrichments to Google Drive via introducing multiple features resulting in more secure service and striking for enterprise customers. Even though security has always been a priority for Google Workspace applications, the new features introduced transcend security along with enhancing access, collaborative and migration capabilities.

Google Drive Enterprise Features

Team Drives

This is a file storage and management collaboration system primarily intended for teams. With Google Team Drives, content sharing and ownership are maintained at the team level. Administrators have the privilege to manage permissions across individuals for modification and reorganization of files.

With this service, Google makes an attempt to simplify data management for agile projects wherein users or project members move in and out of a team / project. All the team member’s data remains in the Team Drives thus on occasions wherein any team member leaves the project all of their project data is available and can be moved to a new location.

Quick Access for Teams

Quick Access powered by Google’s machine learning algorithms envisages the files based on usage patterns i.e. how team members share the files and as per the meetings scheduled with particular topics. This currently works on Android and iOS devices.

This feature is provisioned currently to Google Workspace Enterprise and Google Workspace for Education customers.

Advanced Google Vault for Drive

With advanced Google Vault, Google Workspace administrators can now define the content retention policies on organization sensitive files which support organization compliance policies. Previously, Vault stored all user’s archives until the account is deleted. From now, administrator can define the archiving period of time, so that unnecessary files will be deleted, and important sensitive files will be archived as long as required.

Now Google Vault supports Team Drive as well. This would enable admins to have strong governance control across all the employee Drives and Team Drives. The feature is currently provisioned  to Google Workspace Business, Enterprise and Education customers.

Migrating to Google Drive

Google recently acquired an enterprise level Google Shared Drive migration tool known as AppBridge. This primarily emphasizes on migrating traditional organization servers or cloud based service providers to Google Drive. Some of the interesting use cases include migrating data from corporate email systems and content management systems such as SharePoint.

Google is currently working forward to integrate AppBridge into Google Workspace set of applications for enterprises.

Drive File Stream

This feature lets users stream files into their system based on the intelligent algorithms which predict the files which users may use or need based on their usage patterns. It is available now as a part of Google’s Early Adopter Program.

For this feature to work, a user is required to have Google Drive installed into their system. The interesting aspect is that even though the Drive shows as a local folder, not all files are downloaded. This eventually saves hard disk space for end users.

New Spinbackup Features for Google Team Drives

From a Google Drive security perspective, most of the features introduced have focused on enterprise agility, security, and enhancing storage capabilities. However, new potential security vulnerabilities come alongside all of the advantages a new feature or application would bring to an enterprise.

To protect Google Workspace users from all potential damages they may face, Spinbackup extends its services to Team Drive spaces. Spinbackup is the first vendor to introduce Team Drives Backup & Recovery.

With this package, all features available for Google Drive become available for Team Drives. These include automatic backup, one-click recovery, migration to another Team Drive or to Google Drive, local downloads.

In our nearest roadmap, we are going to release the Team Drives data audit features.

• Do you, as a Google Workspace administrator, know exactly which files are shared outside your organization and which new files are added to the Team Drives shared outside?

Spinbackup for Team Drives resolves these security issues with high-quality data protection tools, such as Data Audit of Shared Files, Credit Card Number Detection and Trash Bin Tracking. It is the machine, not you, who will keep an eye on every sensitive item shared outside; every piece of sensitive data, stored within Google Drive; and notify you only with security alerts, so that you don’t need to check the sharing settings every other day.

If you take advantage of Google Team Drives, then protect them with Spinbackup.