Intelligent Data Classification: Transforming Google Drive Security

Our customers often tell us about how they implement manual classification policies. However, with several hundreds of files created daily, and constant sharing between teams, it becomes impossible to enforce secure sharing and sensitive data protection. 

Imagine that your sales team just accidentally shared a spreadsheet containing customer credit card details with an external vendor. Or perhaps your HR department stored employee health records in a folder that wasn't properly restricted. Or your product team shared a spreadsheet with hundreds of secrets and credentials belonging to one of your customer environments. These aren't hypothetical scenarios—they're real challenges that security teams face daily.

In 2023 alone, mishandled sensitive data led to an average cost of $4.81 million per breach. The truth is: most organizations don't know what sensitive data lurks in their Google Drive. Customer social security numbers hidden in old spreadsheets, API keys buried in files that are shared externally, merger plans scattered across shared folders—you name it.

Here are just a few more commonplace examples:

• Employees saving sensitive files in personal drives without realizing the risks
• Teams collaborating across departments, mixing confidential and general data
• Documents getting copied, moved, and shared, losing their original context in the process
• Manual tracking becoming more difficult as data volumes expand

In these cases, it’s not enough to provide basic guidance on where to share what data. Customers need an automated, dynamic, and human-centric cloud DLP solution to label and classify data in Google Drive. 

Go Beyond Google's Native Capabilities

While Google's Gemini offers basic labeling, enterprise security teams need more. Google Workspace's native labeling capabilities, including Gemini, need extensive training—often requiring hundreds of manually classified files—before becoming production-ready. This approach is not only time-consuming but introduces security risks during the training phase. 

However, a more advanced, AI-native solution like Nightfall requires only a fraction of the time. With Nightfall, you can get started with pre-trained ML detectors that can identify hundreds of types of sensitive data across categories such as PII, PHI, PCI, secrets and credentials. You can also create your own custom detectors using patterns unique to your organization. Nightfall’s detectors bring three critical advantages:

1. Zero training time: Unlike Gemini, Nightfall’s detectors work immediately upon deployment, as they’ve already been trained on hundreds of terabytes and patterns of data.
2. Contextual understanding: Nightfall’s  ML models don't just pattern-match—they understand the context surrounding sensitive data. They can differentiate between a random 16-digit number and an actual credit card number, or between an active and an inactive API key. This reduces the volume of false positives that often plague more rudimentary classification systems.
3. Continuous evolution: Nightfall’s detectors continuously improve based on anonymized learning across our customer base; they stay ahead of new data patterns with automated, supervised learning capabilities.

Additionally, Nightfall provides:

• Deep content inspection for sensitive data patterns across all file types in Google Drive
• Workflows to classify files based on sharing permissions or exfiltration thresholds
• Integration with existing security tools (SIEM/SOAR) 
• Comprehensive audit trails on successful or failed scenarios where labels were applied to a given file
• Bulk remediation capabilities across files in Google Drive
• Search and filtering capabilities based on Google Drive labels 
• Inline protection of outgoing emails via Gmail thus offering a comprehensive DLP solution for Google Workspace

AI-Powered Data Classification for Google Drive

Automatic data identification and protection features are at the heart of any robust Google Workspace security plan. Here’s how Nightfall’s data classification capabilities can transform your security practices in Google Drive—and also improve end-user awareness about proper data handling procedures: 

1. Automated labeling with ML-trained detectors: Nightfall’s enterprise-grade detectors are trained on millions of data patterns to automatically identify and classify sensitive content in real time. When our system detects PII, PCI, PHI, or credentials, it instantly applies appropriate labels based on your organization's classification scheme. This happens continuously as your teams work, requiring zero training or manual setup. You can also use drive labels as a filtering criterion in sensitive data protection policies for Google Drive.

2. Enable end users to label files: Nightfall users can empower end users to apply labels on files with sensitive data. End users can use the full context available within Slack or Email alerts to apply any available labels based on your organization’s classification policy. This encourages active participation from end users, and also maintains user productivity while improving the overall security posture of your Google Drive environment. 

3. Data exfiltration prevention and posture management: You can also create targeted policies to monitor the exfiltration of files or track posture settings of files based on specific labels. This provides users with more controls to detect and prevent exfiltration, as well as to secure posture settings for files in Google Drive. 

4. True automation at scale: Nightfall automatically discovers all labels of “type badged” list and “options” list instantaneously, and allows you to utilize it across workflows in Nightfall. You can create tailored policies to only scan files with certain labels, automate your classification efforts, or conduct targeted investigations on files with certain labels. There is no manual effort involved to ingest newly created or existing drive labels from Google Workspace to Nightfall.

To summarize, Nightfall’s labeling capabilities for Google Drive provides the below benefits: 

1. Risk reduction: Automatically identify and protect sensitive data before it's exposed.
2. Compliance readiness: Maintain continuous compliance with automated classification with industry standards and security requirements such as ISO 27001, PCI-DSS and more.
3. Operational efficiency: Reduce manual security reviews and incident response time.
4. Business enablement: Maintain collaboration speed while ensuring security. Improve user awareness on security best practices and improve security hygiene. 

TL;DR

The security of your Google Workspace environment shouldn't rely on sub-par native features. With Nightfall’s automated data classification, you can:

• Gain visibility into sensitive data exposure
• Enforce consistent security policies
• Empower secure collaboration at scale

Ready for comprehensive security coverage for your Google Workspace environment? Contact our sales team or your customer success representative to learn more about automated data classification today.