Google Drive is a great collaboration tool with lots of features. As of September 2022, Google Drive led the file-sharing software market with a market share of 28.13 percent. Almost every individual user and most companies are using Google Drive on their daily drive. 

People are creating, editing, or viewing documents and giving access to collaborate with others.

Employees can share data with outside users so they may work together. The count of externally shared data increases with time, and it becomes challenging to maintain. Additionally, users occasionally add sensitive data later on to folders that have already been shared externally or share sensitive data by accident.

How to secure Google Drive

• Use Google Workspace file exposure report to check document sharing.
• Listen to audit logs of the Drive from Google Workspace.
• Create Data Loss Prevention (DLP) rules from Google Workspace to control externally shared documents.
• Use Resmo to automatically track data access changes and get alerted.

To keep Google Drive documents secure, the organization admin can use Google Workspace file exposure report to check document sharing. But this option is included in Google Workspace Business Edition. If you want different sharing permissions for each group, you need the Business edition as well. Keeping track of exposure reports is a manual approach and requires regular checks of all the shared documents.

The other way is listening to audit logs of the Drive from Google Workspace and checking what’s going on. You can create an automated script and can keep track of the changes. But this method is also a manual approach and needs attention periodically.

To be alerted immediately, you can create Data Loss Prevention (DLP) rules from Google Workspace to control documents that are shared externally. To automize all these processes, keep your documents' historical data access changes, and query with SQL-supported language, you should use Resmo Google Drive integration.

How we built Resmo Google Drive integration

Before building the integration, the most crucial part is accessing documents on the Google Drive Workspace. As Resmo, we do not take any write scope or critical information scope for integration. To get document information on Google Drive integration, we are getting access for audit logs on Reports API.

After the user clicks the create and gives the needed permission on the consent screen for Google Drive integration, Resmo starts to read audit logs of your Google Drive application and builds Google Drive document resources. 

All documents will be persisted as Google Drive Document (queryable as googledrive_document) in the last six months. Because of Google data retention for audit logs on Google Drive, we can reach the last 6 months of the audit logs. 

After this initial polling ends, we create a channel for listening events on your Google Drive workspace. For the different kinds of events, we are creating, updating, or removing your documents on your Resmo account.

With Resmo, you can query your Google Drive resources like documents and customers using the familiar SQL query language and create automated security rules and insight dashboards for continuous compliance and visibility. Start collecting and securing your Google Drive resources by signing up to Resmo for free.