Short answer: Yes.
We at CloudLock are big believers in the cloud. When we launched the company two years ago, we had a mindset that all of our business apps should be in the cloud; there needs to be a very compelling business case for us not to do so. Naturally, the first cloud service we signed up with was Google Apps for your domain – we had a branded domain, email, calendar and gDocs for collaboration – all the makings of a small business IT infrastructure!
When there were 3 people at CloudLock, gDocs was all fun with no worries. When we grew to be a more established company with employees in multiple locations and a team that was extended to partners and contractors, we felt that we needed to treat our Google Docs as important business assets that need to be protected from unauthorized access – just as we do for our internal file servers. We decided to start executing on our original vision of providing a unified data governance solution for business data, whether it’s located on-premise or in the public cloud. So we developed CloudLock for Google Apps, initially by addressing some of our own business needs around making sure that only the right people have access to the right data. As part of the executive team at CloudLock, and as one of the two Google Apps domain admins (the other one is Gil, our CEO) we felt we had no control of how this important asset – our business data, is being used. We wanted to be able to answer some key, fundamental questions:
- Which documents are shared outside of our domain?
- Which documents are shared with ‘Everyone’?
- Which users external to CloudLock have access to which documents?
Once we gained visibility into who has access to what, we became greedy and wanted to be able to take action. We wanted to be able to:
- Terminate the account of an employee or contractor that has departed from us – WITHOUT losing all their data!
- Remove certain external contacts from access to certain documents that they no longer should have access to
As we shared our pain and findings with our customers and beta testers (some of which are also users of Google Apps and gDocs) it became apparent that they all share the same concerns. We validated that there is a real market opportunity here to help innovative enterprises that would like to take advantage of the cloud to do so securely.
We are now taking CloudLock for Google Apps out of stealth mode. CloudLock for Google Apps is a google marketplace app and is being developed and hosted on the Google App platform. We are currently in Beta and are getting some ‘Holy S&!T’ reactions when we do a vulnerability assessment of our design partners’ gDocs environments. That’s what you get when the CEO realizes that all the employees have access to the capitalization table (true story!)
If your organization is using Google Docs, and you need total visibility and control over your data, ensuring that only the right users have access to the right data at all times – you should apply to be part of our beta program – please email me at tsahy@cloudlock.com .
CloudLock For Google Apps helps Google Apps administrators secure access to their Google Docs and Sites. 7 day free trials are available on the Google Apps Marketplace.
