Know All About How to Secure Your Google Drive

Introduction

In this article, we will know All About How to Secure Your Google Drive. Understanding how to secure your Google Drive to protect your data is crucial for users as security can be a concerning factor when you browse the internet, and every company takes it very seriously to ensure the safety of their users, and Google is no exception. Thus, Google works extra hard to provide world-class security for their customers, which makes their products safe to use.

Moving on, an important feature of the G-suite is Google Drive, or G-drive, as it is popularly known. It’s a cloud-based storage service that allows you to upload online content such as files, folders, images, videos, and more.

Since you can use G-drive to store crucial data, personal or professional, it is also imperative to ensure its security to safeguard such details. So, let’s learn more about that.

Why is it important to secure Google Drive?

By securing Google Drive, you will get the following benefits –

• You will get notifications about suspicious login, unauthorized file download, or app activity.
• You can safely browse your files and folders in the Drive. 
• You can safeguard your files and folders from unknown and unauthorized users. 
• It protects your privacy from scammers and hackers and keeps you safe from any kind of cybercrime. 

Understanding Google Drive security features

Now, let’s understand the G-Drive security features –

• Security for content

When you upload any file to Google Drive, it will be preserved in Google's data centers, which maintain world-class data encryption standards. As a result, you can securely access your files from Drive and offline, too. Google's built-in security always safeguards your files from phishing, malware, and spam.

• Protect your content from sharing via advertising

The drive never shares your data from the uploaded contents. Also, it assures that they never use your content data for advertising purposes.

• Improve user experience

Drive preserves your content by providing services like enabling the search for Drive files within an individual’s Google account, virus detection, spam filtering, and malware protection. Also, Drive collects crash analytics and performance data to increase their reliability, performance, and efficiency in handling troubleshooting issues. They also archive these data and analytics to prevent abuse of their services.

• Sync your data and keep you updated

By signing in to your Google account, you can easily get access to those files that you have uploaded on Drive through other devices and acquire updates on Drive services and user activity. Drive save your name and email address to sync your data.

How to create a strong password for your Google account?

So, let’s understand how you can create a strong password for your Google account –

• Always use long passwords. Also, ensure that you can remember them. To make your password memorable, you can use meaningful phrases, song lyrics, quotes from books or films, or abbreviations. 
• Avoid using your data like birthdates, anniversary dates, nicknames, initials, housing names, street names, etc. Also, never use simple words (e.g., Password, name, etc.), phrases, sequences (e.g., ‘123’, ‘XYZ,’ ‘ABC,’ ‘ABC,’ etc.), and keyboard patterns (e.g., qwerty, etc.).
• Writing your password in a diary or notebook is not the safest option. You should use a password management tool like Google Password Manager. It encrypts your data and provides suggestions for your passwords, such as notifications about unsafe passwords and suggestions for strong passwords, and blocks unauthorized access. 

Learn more strategies for strong passwords from here. 

Enabling two-factor authentication for added security to secure Google Drive

Two-factor authentication or two-step verification for Gmail is a cutting-edge technique to boost your Google account’s security. It secures your password from being stolen by the hackers. After enabling 2-step verification, you can sign in to your account through your password and your phone. So, follow these steps –

1. First, open your Google account.
2. Then select Security from the navigation panel. 
3. After that, select 2-Step Verification under the ‘How you sign in to Google’ section.
4. Click Get started.
5. Then follow the on-screen instructions. 
6. After that, verify your identity with the second step. Here you need to verify your identity with Google prompts. Google prompts are the types of push notifications that you will receive on your Android phone or iPhone. 
7. Based on your device and location information you will get the notifications. Then, you can allow the sign-in by tapping Yes and block the sign-in by tapping No. 
8. Googlealso asks you for a PIN or other confirmation. 

Managing file permissions and access levels to secure Google Drive

To manage your file permissions and access levels for Google Drive, you have to follow these steps –

1. Sign in to your Google account through Google Admin Console.
2. Then, go to Menu > Apps > Google Workspace > Drive and Docs. 
3. Next, click Manage shared drives. 
4. Now, you can manage the members for your Drive file. So, here you will get two filter options – Click Add a filter > No members for finding shared drives that don’t have any members. Click Add a filter > No managers for the drives that don’t have any managers.
5.   Now, you can add a person or group and give them access to your Google Drive. So, you have to enter their email address, select access level, and select if you want to notify them (optional).
6. Then click Send or Share. 
7. Also, you can remove a person/group from your shared drive access. For this, you need to go to the next of the person/group name and click access level. Then click Remove Access.
8.  Finally, click Save. 

Audit Linked Google Drive Apps

You can get a Drive audit log report from Google Admin Console. So, you have to follow this path to get the report: Reporting > Audit and Investigation> Drive log events.

Also, you can use third-party apps like Google Drive Permissions Auditor. It scans all the files and folders of your Google Drive and prepares the audit report on the shared files in your Google Drive. This report includes the size and MIME type of your files, the types of access your users have for these files, the path of the files in your Google Drive, etc. You can download this app from Google Workspace Marketplace. 

Encrypting files and folders in Google Drive

Encryption is the process of protecting your data through encoding techniques. For an encrypted file, the users to whom the file is shared can access the file only through an encryption key. Generally, Google encrypts content by transit and at rest. But, if your admin enables client-side encryption for your domain, the domain will get an extra layer of protection. However remember you can only access this option if you are a Google workspace account user with your verified identity and client side encryption enabled by your administrator. Now, let’s see how to create a new encrypted file in Drive –

1. Go to Google Drive.
2. Click New (+) from the top left.
3. Next, point to the arrow next to Docs, Sheets, or Slides.
4. After that, click Blank encrypted documents/ spreadsheet/ presentation.

Source 

Also, you can add encryption to a document in this method –

1. First, open Google Docs, Sheet, or Slide.
2. Then, click File > Make a copy > Add additional encryption.Google Doc Copy Option 

Update and monitor your Google Drive security settings regularly

Follow these tips to update your Drive security settings –

1. First of all, you can choose who will get access to your shared files to Drive. So, you can restrict people from viewing your files or give them access to see it. Learn more about it from Stop, limit, or change sharing.
2. You can check your Google account logs from Access Transparency log events. These log events include data about a particular action, its time, the reason behind it, and more. But, you must have a Google account for business or school to perform this action.
3. You can see and delete data that Google collected to use across different Google services through My Activity So, learn Access and control activity in your account.
4. You can manage your Drive search history through My Activity. In this way, you can manage all the recent searches in your Drive, which Google stores as search queries. 
5. You must sync your Google services with your current location. It will help Google to get information about your current location and keep your account safe from login attempts from unauthorized locations. 

Foresight’s solution for automating your regular Google Workspace workflows

Do you feel overwhelmed by proceeding with your regular Google Workspace Workflows? Don’t panic. Foresight has the ultimate solution to your problem. It’s a no-code automation platform that streamlines your workflows and improves productivity. Its data-driven insights help you to understand the processes in-depth and make informed decisions for the next steps of your business. So, learn about the use cases of Foresight, such as – Apps Reporting and getting alerts in Google Workspace, etc. 

Conclusion

Google Drive helps you to store important data without consuming extra space in your physical devices. But, you need to ensure the security of the data that you have uploaded to Google Drive for your own interests. Hopefully, now you have an idea of how to secure your Google Drive from this blog. So, it’s time to try it yourself.

Try a 14-day free trial of Foresight and automate your regular Google Workspace workflow.