Are your Google Docs leaking?

Are your Google Docs leaking?

Just the other day I read an article on Infoworld that claimed that “Google Docs is ‘widely used’ at 1 in 5 workplaces”.

Almost at the same time our Google Apps admin got an email from Google titled “Google Apps: Important changes coming to published Google Docs” asking that a certain option be checked otherwise all the docs shared outside our domain will be indexed and available on the world wide web….

20% is a big number. I mean, I knew that there are companies out there that use Google Apps – and specifically google docs – to run their business (I had that insight since we at Aprigo are doing exactly that). This triggers a very important topic: being able to have a ‘holistic view’ or unified way to manage data, be it locally or in the cloud.

There are some problems that manifest themselves when your data is on premise but less so when it’s in the cloud. A good example would be the cost of that data. Even though storage prices drop all the time, it still costs more than what Google charges you for that space – $0 . Other problems exist both for your on-premise data and your cloud data. An example for that would be ‘Access Management’, or being able to answer questions like:

• Who has access to a specific data set?
• Who shouldn’t have access to a data set?
• What’s a accessible to a specific user or group?
• Who’s doing what with the data?

I find most companies take a hybrid approach. If you’re a relatively young company, you might have started with everything in the cloud, but over time gradually adding local applications and infrastructure. For example, you might set the company up with:

• Google Apps – for email,calendar, documents etc.
• AWS – as your virtual infrastructure
• An online Bug tracking system, expense system etc.

But then a few things happen:

• At some point the engineering team requests a local file server so they can share files that are either unsupported on Google docs or too large to be transferred across the WAN for the guys sitting next to each other to access
• At yet another time, the QA team wants to deploy a few local VMs so they can do some performance testing that’s not possible to do on AWS
• Users start keeping local copies of their google docs
• Other users insist on using Microsoft Office or Apple iWork because “There are some things I just can’t do on Google spreadsheets”

The end result? You end-up with a ‘Hybrid Infrastructure’ – some of it is local, some of it is in the cloud, some of the data is local, some of it is in the cloud.

If you’re a more established company, you probably started with 100% of your infrastructure on-premise, but then:

• You launch an IT project that spawns a few VMs on Amazon Web Services
• A few of your users are using Google Docs to more easily share data with co-workers and even external suppliers, customers etc
• The sales team is standardizing on Salesforce.com

In this case most likely 80% of your data is on-premise and only 20% is in the cloud but you notice the trend here, and even that 20% needs to be managed.
When a company has its data fragmented on-premise and in-the cloud, the IT management applications it uses (specifically Data Management Applications) need to support that fragmented environment.

It’s one thing to have different classes  of IT management applications for on-premise and cloud environments. If I care about ‘Access Management’, then ideally the same app can also provide a ‘Cloud Access Management’ capability. Taking this even further would be if those capabilities were able to provide a holistic view of my data regardless of where it sits. An example use-case where a holistic view would be helpful:

1. Using my access management application, I’m able to lock down the finance folder on my file server.
2. A ‘finance user’ uploads a document from the finance folder to Google docs and shares it with internal & external users
3. My ‘Cloud Access Management’ application is able to alert me that there are different access permissions for the same document in those two different locations and that a potential data leak exists.

The cloud storage trend is not going away. This isn’t just a fad. And if 20% of workplaces are currently using things like Google Docs, think of how quickly that number is going to rise. The time for IT management apps that can understand access, permissions, rights and security both on-premise and in the cloud is now.

Tagged as: Cloud Access Management, gDocs

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