Skip to content

Bringing Google Apps Administrators Advanced Security with Drive for Work’s New Audit API

BetterCloud

July 23, 2014

2 minute read

small drive slider

Two years ago we launched FlashPanel in the Google Apps Marketplace and just eight months prior, we founded BetterCloud. Over the past two-and-a-half years, we’ve grown to a team of 75 and have built a customer base of more than 40,000 organizations spread across the globe. Throughout this rapid growth, we’ve never lost sight of our mission – always put the customer first. To thank our customers and emphasize this mission going forward, blog content over the next month will focus on our commitment to providing a world-class customer experience. To keep up to date, be sure to subscribe to the blog and follow us on Google+.

David Hardwick is Chief Technology Officer at BetterCloud.

OCM-devicesLast month Google unveiled a new premium offering for Google Apps customers. Google Drive for Work (part of Apps Unlimited) brings customers a range of functionality including unlimited storage, advanced security capabilities that can be applied at the organizational unit level, Google Apps Vault functionality for Drive and a brand new Audit API. It is this Audit API that has our team most excited.

The brand new Audit API is especially powerful when it comes to providing added security around Google Drive. Utilizing the new Audit API, our product FlashPanel will be able to notify administrators in real time when a change is made to a Google Drive document. Notices will pertain to:

  • When someone is added to a document
  • When a document is shared publicly
  • When a document is removed from a company-wide shared folder
  • When a document has been created, edited, renamed, moved or added to a folder, marked as trash, deleted or removed from trash

Administrators will be able to set tailored policies on when and how they’d like to be notified. For instance, if you’re not interested in receiving a notice when a document has been edited, you can set your policies as such. Additionally, FlashPanel Enterprise customers will be able to execute searches for PCI (credit card numbers) and PII (social security numbers and email addresses) compliance checks at the time a document is edited or shared externally by using the real-time capabilities of the new Audit API and FlashPanel’s regular expression and policy engine.

Google Apps’ native enterprise-level security features along with FlashPanel’s advanced, granular controls allow Google Apps administrators to create secure, efficient and accountable environments in the cloud while giving end-users the ability to collaborate freely.

This latest API release not only enables BetterCloud to better serve our customers, but also shows Google’s continued commitment to building a thriving developer community around the Google Apps platform. As Google makes more APIs available, we look forward to continuing to deliver on our promise of providing unparalleled administrative and security capabilities to tens of thousands of Google Apps administrators around the globe.