Google Boosts Data Loss Prevention in Gmail
Both Google and Microsoft know data leakage is a big concern among organizations considering the move to cloud-based e-mail and collaboration and both companies are now touting the data loss prevention (DLP) in their respective offerings.
Microsoft stepped up its support for protecting against data leakage last fall when it announced the rollout of DLP for both OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. For its part, while Google doesn't support DLP in Google Drive yet, the company said it is planning on offering it later this year. But Google last week said it has added new DLP capabilities for Gmail shops that use Google Apps Unlimited, which the company describes as the premium version of its Google Apps for Work offering.
Google started offering DLP capability for its Google Apps Unlimited customers in December, enabling admins to set policies so that users can't send or forward e-mail with certain types of information, such as social security numbers.
The upgraded DLP features announced last week adds support for scanned documents using optical character recognition (OCR), predefined content detectors and support for new parameters. Specifically, the new OCR ability can extract text from scanned images and use DLP from the administrators console at the OU level to set content compliance and set rules for objectionable information. The new detectors can be set to discover personally identifiable information and data types that would fall under HIPAA rules. Administrators can fine tune parameters such as noting that a single credit card number is OK while sending bulk transmissions would be blocked.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/08/2016 at 4:58 PM