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If your enterprise uses Google Workspace, chances are you have sensitive data hidden in your Google Drive files.
DoControl data (sampled from ~1000 enterprise customers) that companies possessed, on average, 3.7K publicly exposed Google Drive assets that contained sensitive data.
Anyone with the link could get to this sensitive enterprise data.
Our data revealed that the volume of internally exposed sensitive data assets were even larger. These organizations had, on average, 186K sensitive Google Drive assets that were accessible to every user in the organization - from the CEO to the summer intern.
Earlier this year we wrote a comprehensive post about Google Drive security. But we know that moving from understanding principles to taking practical action is sometimes trickier than it looks. That’s the purpose of this post.
We’ll cover the following key steps in how to secure Google Drive for your organization:
- Configure Google Workspace information rights management
- Make MFA a requirement
- Educate end users on how to secure Google Drive
- Set up email-based security alerts
- Consider endpoint management
- Regularly review your Google Drive third-party apps
- Implement a CASB
1. Configure Google Workspace Information Rights Management
Google Workspace provides an interface for information rights management: configuring global Google Drive settings limiting re-sharing, downloading, printing, copying, or changing permissions to prevent accidental or intentional data exposure. This configuration is the responsibility of your organization’s Google Workspace administrators, who are usually part of the IT or information security department.
There’s no one ideal configuration. This set of Google Workspace security settings includes their recommended configurations for Google Drive and reasons behind the recommendations, which is great to get you thinking, but the best configuration for you will depend on your organization’s business needs, compliance requirements and other factors.
2. Make MFA a Requirement
Since the days of “open sesame!”, passwords have been discovered, guessed and stolen. Phishing scams, brute force attacks and users who insist on choosing “password123” as their password (sigh) increase the chances that your Google Drive assets are at risk from a threat actor who can simply sign in.
Phishing, credential stuffing, and social engineering are just a few of the ways attackers can compromise accounts in SaaS. Enabling MFA is a simple yet powerful way for Google admins to help prevent these types of breaches.
MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) enhances security by requiring multiple forms of verification before granting access to systems or data. Even if an unauthorized party gains access to a user’s credentials, the likelihood that they will also have access to the user’s phone (security token via SMS) or index finger (biometric validation) is small.
Small tweaks to can make a big difference in preventing an account compromise in Google Workspace, so it's important to never skip the basics.
3. Educate End Users on How to Secure Google Drive
As effective as your InfoSec team is, the burden of securing Google Drive cannot rest solely on their shoulders. Ignorant or negligent employees and end users will continue to overexpose files, drawing your InfoSec team into a resource-draining game of Whack-a-Mole.
Most employees don't mean any harm, they are simply uneducated on the proper security policies they should be enforcing.
The key to more effective Google Drive security that actually demands less of your InfoSec team is empowering and educating your end users on how to secure Google Drive assets. SaaS security best practices education programs are one popular way of doing this, but more effective in the long-term is education in real time, as a risky action is performed.
Using this approach, a user attempting to share a Google Doc with a personal email address, or to set a Google Sheet with “Budget” in the file name to ‘Anyone with the link can view’, would receive a message informing them of and explaining the issue, and requesting them to remediate. An SSPM or SaaS DLP is often the tool of choice for this end user involvement.
4. Set Up Email-based Security Alerts
Google Workspace provides administrators with tools like audit logs, security reports about user behavior that may indicate a security risk, and a security center with information about how files have been shared.
If a Google Drive security risk is only discovered when you go in to check your security center console, however, it could be way too late to contain the damage. Setting up email-based alerts enables you to be more proactive about identifying potential security issues and addressing them promptly.
5. Consider Endpoint Management
Another domain in which Google Workspace admins can secure Google Drive is in controlling aspects of the end user devices used to access the corporate Google Drive accounts and assets. Endpoint management capabilities include device encryption, screen lock, password enforcement, remote sign-out and remote wiping of corporate accounts should devices be lost or stolen.
While endpoint management can be implemented on either corporate or personal devices, it is more realistic in a situation where users only access corporate Google assets through a dedicated corporate device.
Where productivity considerations create a culture encouraging users to work remotely and access Google Workspace through whatever device is at hand, endpoint management may be more of a liability than an asset. When thinking about how to secure Google Drive, endpoint management should be considered in the context of your company priorities.
6. Regularly Review your Google Drive Third-party Apps
Your Google Workspace users and the parties with whom they share assets aren’t the only ones who can access your Google Drive data. One of the reasons why companies use Google Drive is the productivity boost that comes from Google Drive apps and add-ons.
These third-party shadow apps create connections between Google Drive and the other SaaS applications your organization uses, such as Box, Salesforce, DocuSign, Zoho - and many, many more. While this is wonderful for productivity, it also opens up a new channel through which your Google Drive data can be exposed.
The exposure risk is exacerbated by the fact that many third-party OAuth apps ask for permissions that they don’t even need for their function. In our recent analysis of DoControl data, we found that out of 29K OAuth apps used by our clients within the last year, approximately 65% of them were over-permissioned!
Additionally, apps tend to stick around much longer than they should. 90% of all installed apps hadn’t been used at all in the 30 days preceding our analysis. That is an unnecessary addition to your attack surface.
In order to minimize your exposure and security risk, you need to conduct regular reviews of your Google Drive app inventory to make sure you don’t have unnecessary or over-permissioned apps.
This is only becoming an increasingly bigger attack surface, as GenAI shadow apps and third-party AI browser extensions are being added to the tech stack constantly in 2026.
7. Implement an SaaS Security Solution
As SaaS adoption continues to grow, so does the complexity of managing and securing these platforms. SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) tools, like DoControl, help organizations continuously monitor and remediate risks across their SaaS environments.
These solutions automatically evaluate user permissions, configurations, and integrations to ensure that only authorized personnel have access to sensitive data, systems, and devices. By doing so, SSPM helps prevent the common pitfalls of over-permissioned accounts, misconfigurations, and compliance violations - some of the most frequent causes of SaaS-related breaches.
Beyond simply identifying risks, modern SSPM solutions that offer active remediation can significantly strengthen your organization’s ability to respond to threats in real time. They continuously perform security checks aligned with industry standards and benchmarks, highlighting insecure configurations or policy violations before they escalate into larger problems.
Ultimately, SSPM brings visibility, control, and accountability to SaaS security - transforming what was once a reactive process into a continuous cycle of assessment and improvement. For organizations managing multiple SaaS applications and users, an SSPM platform like DoControl is not just a convenience - it’s a critical layer of defense needed in 2026 and beyond!
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Conclusion
While Google Drive and Google Workspace provide robust native security features, they are not a complete solution for the way data moves today acorss a million different SaaS apps.
While yes, organizations must take full advantage this checklist and use Google’s built-in capabilities, they should also recognize their limitations when it comes to Google's DLP and Google's remediation capabilities.
As SaaS environments expand and data sprawl increases, businesses need more advanced capabilities like SaaS DLP, data access governance, granular access controls, contextual identity monitoring, and third-party app management when it comes to truly protecting the critical company data that lives within SaaS applications.
Adding a SaaS security solution that enables active remediation ensures that when misconfigurations, oversharing, or emerging risks like AI-driven threats and shadow AI arise, they can be detected and contained before damage occurs.
In short, securing Google Drive requires a layered approach - combining native controls with purpose-built SaaS security solutions to maintain continuous visibility, compliance, and trust in your SaaS ecosystem.
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