New and better methods for the security and compliance of organisations' data

Seeking better control over the dissemination of corporate information, over the past two weeks Google made three significant changes to its Google Apps for Work and Google Apps for Education platforms.

The first, announced on 2015/07/14, is available for any file stored in Google Drive and aims to block the download, print and copy options for a file. More information.

The second appeared on 2015/07/20 and strengthens the enforcement of policies on sharing files outside the organisation as set by administrators, preventing sharing with the general public, with users outside the organisation's domain, or with people in specific domains (e.g. competitors). More information.

The third, announced yesterday (2015/07/23), improves the content-control policies for email messages, allowing differentiated processing of messages containing specific content (defined by keywords, phrases, text or numeric patterns, e.g. a credit card number), or attachments of disallowed types. Now, instead of relying on the extension that indicates the file type, Google automatically detects the file type even if the user changes its extension (for example from .xls to .txt). More information.