Paint Point #4: It’s Hard to Leverage Google Labels to Prevent Data Loss

This is a 7 part series that will be released in segments - this fourth section focuses on why Google Labels is great for classification, but does not provide the visibility or actionability needed to properly control data overexposure.

Background

Google Workspace has completely revolutionized the way organizations do business, resulting in increased collaboration, productivity and efficiency. Sounds great, right? The only drawback is that all this collaboration comes with a price: an organization’s security is compromised, overexposed data leads to data loss and financial cost, and an organization’s reputation might suffer irreversible damage.

Google Workspace is NOT a Security Solution

Yes, Google Workspace is a super-productive collaboration platform. But it has critical gaps when it comes to security, especially protecting and accessing your data, authenticating identities, and monitoring compliance. Learn more about strengthening your Google Drive security to mitigate these risks.

Let’s take a closer look at 7 pain points that pose a critical threat to an organization’s security posture:

1. Sensitive company data is overexposed on Google Drive - Google Workspace is susceptible to attacks that potentially compromise sensitive information: a staggering 94% of organizations reported phishing attacks in 2024 (Egress Email Security Risk Report). There’s limited visibility into data access, and it’s impossible to know the exact locations of all sensitive assets across Google Drive, and how they’re exposed. Overexposure of sensitive data opens the door to data exfiltration and even malicious data breaches.

2. Google Workspace DLP capabilities are limited - They cannot prevent your employees from exfiltrating data through their personal accounts, sharing with external collaborators, or downloading data to endpoints. File sharing permissions are view or edit only, and Google Workspace lacks native tools to prevent sensitive data loss, resulting in unauthorized sharing and potential leakage. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to remediate overexposure of large volumes of data.

3. Malicious or unsanctioned 3rd party shadow apps - The average organization uses over 1200 apps, increasing the potential attack surface. If not properly managed, the proliferation of shadow apps installed in your Google Workspace increases the probability of unauthorized access.‍

4. Google labels alone don’t prevent data loss - On the one hand, Google labels help to organize, find, and apply policies to files in your Drive. But the more Google labels your organization has, the harder it is to search for specific assets. Google labels don’t provide granular access control. Your organization still needs robust permission settings to ensure sensitive documents aren't accidentally exposed or shared with unauthorized parties.

5. Insider threats and identity challenges - Employees are said to be the weak link in an organization’s security chain, and leaving or disgruntled employees can pose the biggest threat. It’s relatively easy for about-to-leave employees to download large volumes of assets, or worse, delete files. A Google Workspace vulnerability recently allowed hackers to bypass the email verification step when creating accounts, and impersonate legitimate account owners. Even more threatening is that Google’s domain-wide delegation can unintentionally give users unauthorized access to an entire Workspace domain.

6. Challenge of meeting compliance requirements across Google Workspace - Google Workspace’s default settings don’t necessarily meet strict regulation requirements, such as GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA. To ensure compliance,  organizations need to invest in manual effort or third-party tools.‍

7. Difficulty in pinpointing your riskiest use cases and security threats across the organization - With so much data at our fingertips, it becomes a challenge to differentiate high-risk user behavior from medium- or low-risk. We need to know clearly what use cases and anomalies we’re looking for before we can actually see it.

There is a solution. You can bridge your Google Workspace security gaps seamlessly with DoControl, an agentless automated solution that remedies each pain point with ease, without impacting your productivity.

Most security solutions on the market will protect your organization’s endpoint - be it a laptop or mobile device - from being attacked and infecting the entire organization. But these solutions don’t take into account, or even correlate, the user’s behavior across SaaS apps. DoControl connects the data dots between Google Workspace and all your SaaS apps, including Slack, HRIS and IdPs, to provide your organization with a robust security solution based uniquely on enriched data context.

Pain point #4: It’s hard to leverage Google labels to prevent data loss

Challenge: My organization classifies sensitive documents with Google labels. We have large volumes of documents, across multiple drives, so it’s difficult to track which documents are being shared with who. What happens is that documents labelled as “sensitive” end up being shared with external parties, and sometimes even publicly. The labels are not helping us to prevent large-scale overexposure.

Solution: DoControl boosts your Google Drive data security beyond its standard capabilities to automatically mitigate overexposure based on a file’s Google label. With DoControl's proactive approach, you can nip any Google vulnerabilities in the bud before they become major liabilities.

What's a Google label?

A Google label is a tag like a digital sticky note. It allows your company to organize Google Drive files, especially if the content is sensitive or classified. Only Google administrators can create labels. They can be applied manually, automatically, or through AI to your files, depending on your company policy. To apply labels automatically, Google Workspace DLP scans your Google Drive and applies DLP labels according to rules.

You can categorize the same file with multiple labels, so a project proposal could be labeled with "Q1 Planning", "Sensitive", and "Executive Review" all at the same time without having to duplicate the file. 

Drawbacks of Google labels

Too many labels can create confusion. It's crucial to develop a lean, intuitive labeling strategy that isn’t chaotic to manage. As label count grows, search and filtering can become slower, especially in large enterprise environments with thousands of documents.

Labels themselves don't inherently provide granular access control. Your organization still needs robust permission settings to ensure sensitive documents aren't accidentally exposed or shared with unauthorized parties.

Oversharing Google Drive files can lead to sensitive data being overexposed, and open the door to the risk of data exfiltration and even malicious data breaches. 

Boost your Google label visibility with DoControl

With DoControl, get maximum visibility into all your Google labels, since they’re automatically displayed in DoControl’s asset inventory. These capabilities are unique to DoControl: 

• Search for specific Google labels across your organization’s entire Google Drive and see the results instantly, even for thousands of assets.
• See exactly how many assets in your organization have a specific Google label.  
• At a glance, view the number of Google Drive assets that are externally, publicly or internally exposed across your organization, per Google label. Drill-down to discover all your assets with a specific label.

Leveraging Google labels, you can filter through DoControl’s asset inventory and correlate between Google labels, sharing status, data ownership, external collaborators, file activity, and more. 

After filtering to slice and dice your data, it’s easy to apply bulk remediation actions, such as cleaning up external sharing, and transferring data ownership.

Boost your label security capabilities with DoControl

You can leverage Google labels in DoControl workflows to mitigate file exposure for any classified assets with a specific label, such as “highly sensitive.”

DoControl’s automated workflows are triggered by user activity events, periodically scheduled dates, or on-demand by DoControl users. Workflows are granular, scalable, and sophisticated enough to narrow down the scope of risky events and solve critical use cases with high confidence.

To make your life easier, DoControl provides playbooks that you can customize. So whenever someone shares files publicly in Google Drive with a sensitive Google label, the public sharing links are automatically removed from the assets, and the actor is notified in Slack. If your SecOps team approves the file sharing, the public sharing links are not removed.

Take-away

With DoControl, you can leverage sensitive Google labels to focus on remediating historic data overexposure in bulk. What’s more, DoControl boosts your Google Drive data security beyond its standard capabilities to automatically mitigate future overexposure based on a file’s Google label.

FREE Google Workspace Risk Assessment

The first step in securing your Google Workspace is to assess and understand your risks. That's why we offer a free Google Workspace risk assessment that provides the insights you need to identify existing risks and determine the actions required to mitigate them.

If you are interested, feel free to reach out to our team - click here.