How Safe is Google Drive? 

Schools store and manage a range of sensitive data: student identification records, tax records, medical documents, financial statements, and more. Often, schools rely on Google Workspace to handle their data appropriately — including Google Drive. 

In the words of Education Week: “Google products dominate in K-12 classrooms.” Their research shows that approximately 70% of K-12 schools use Google Workspace apps, which includes Google Drive — they also say that among educators, Google products are the solutions of choice. 

This implies that educators and schools more generally trust Google’s applications to securely hold information. But how safe is Google Drive, really? 

Google Drive is secure — Here’s why 

While no platform is 100% secure, Google Drive is safe to store and manage data on. 

Here’s what Google says about the app’s security posture: “Keeping you safe online means protecting your information and respecting your privacy. That’s why, in every product we make, we focus on keeping your information secure, treating it responsibly, and keeping you in control. Our teams work every day to make Google products safe no matter what you’re doing: browsing the web, managing your inbox, or getting directions.”

It’s a trusted platform by over 2 billion active monthly users, including government agencies, financial institutions, educational entities, and others who regularly manage sensitive data.

[FREE] Google Workspace and/or Microsoft 365 Security & Safety Audit. Learn More & Claim

Here are five security features that fuel Google Drive’s strong data loss prevention posture. 

1. End-to-end encryption in transit: Google Drive employs Transport Layer Security (TLS) to encrypt user data as it moves from your device to Google’s servers. This type of encryption ensures that any information transferred is converted into a secure format that is unreadable to anyone except the intended recipient with the decryption key. Put differently, the use of TLS helps to protect your files from being accessed by anyone who might intercept the data as it travels across the internet, meaning you can maintain privacy and data integrity.

2. At-rest encryption: Google Drive uses Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with a 128-bit key to encrypt files stored on its servers. AES-128 is a symmetric key encryption technique — the same standard used by governments and security organizations for securing classified information. Encryption at rest ensures that your data is unreadable on the servers, protecting against unauthorized access and ensuring data confidentiality even if the physical security controls at the data center were to be breached.

3. Two-factor authentication (2FA): Google Drive supports two-factor authentication. 2FA provides an additional layer of security by requiring two forms of verification when logging into your account. This process typically involves something you know (your password) and something you have (such as a smartphone app that generates a time-based, one-time passcode). 2FA tangibly yet simply reduces the risk of unauthorized access resulting from compromised passwords by requiring the additional verification step. 

4. Comprehensive access control settings: Users can precisely control who can access their files in Google Drive through detailed access control settings. You can set files to private, allowing no one else to view them, or you can share them with specific people by entering their email addresses. For broader access, you can create shareable links that can be either public or restricted to specific users. This flexibility allows you to maintain control over your data, deciding who can view, comment on, or edit files according to your needs.

5. Proactive intrusion detection and security monitoring: Google employs a sophisticated security infrastructure that includes proactive intrusion detection and continuous security monitoring of its systems. This system utilizes machine learning and other advanced technologies to detect suspicious activity and potential security threats before they can cause harm. 

While upwards of 40% of Google Drive files contain sensitive information, the combination of these five factors — among other security risk mitigation measures — help ensure that these documents are stored and managed appropriately. 

The security risk factors of storing information on Google Drive 

Google Drive is secure, although it’s not 100% without risk. Google Drive security issues are most often related to misconfigurations in access and security settings. Risk factors can be external and internal, meaning schools need to protect their data from leaks as well as malicious attacks.

Here’s some of the risk factors to consider. 

Third-party apps

Third-party apps can pose significant risks as they often request permissions to access, modify, or share Google Drive files. If these apps are malicious or become compromised, they can be a conduit for data breaches. Even legitimate apps may have vulnerabilities that, if exploited, could lead to unauthorized data access.

To safeguard against risks posed by third-party apps, users should regularly review and audit app permissions and only ever grant access to trustworthy and necessary applications. In a similar vein, users also must understand the extent of permissions granted to each app and to revoke any that are unnecessary or overly permissive. If ever in doubt, Google’s security settings allow users to see which apps have access to their Drive and modify these permissions as needed.

Phishing and malware 

Phishing attacks targeting Google Drive users typically involve fraudulent communications that mimic legitimate Google notifications to steal user credentials. Attackers may also use malicious links in Google Docs or attachments in emails that lead to malware infections or credential harvesting sites.

To defend against phishing and malware, users should be vigilant about verifying the authenticity of any message that asks for their credentials or directs them to a webpage asking for personal information. Vigilance here means implementing advanced email security solutions that can detect suspicious activity and quarantine phishing attempts and malicious attachments. Users should also keep their browser and antivirus software up to date to protect against malware that might exploit software vulnerabilities.

Internal data leaks

Internal data leaks are by far the most common Google Drive security risk. They occur when sensitive information is inadvertently shared or exposed by legitimate users. This can happen through misconfigured sharing settings that expose data to unintended audiences or by users mistakenly sending files to the wrong recipients.

Preventing internal data leaks involves: 

• Implementing strict data control policies. 
• Using, with consideration, Google Drive’s detailed sharing permissions to restrict who can view, edit, or share files. 
• Training employees on data handling best practices. 
• Utilizing tools that automatically classify and control access to sensitive information based on its content.
• Regularly auditing sharing settings and access logs to help identify and rectify potential exposures before they lead to data breaches.

How to protect your school district’s Google Drive

Alongside each security measure mentioned above, there is one tried-and-true step that K-12 schools should take to ensure the strength of their cybersecurity posture: lean on data security software. 

At ManagedMethods, our threat protection and account management software, Cloud Monitor, provides end-to-end Google Drive security: real-time data breach detection, automated threat response, comprehensive access control settings, advanced phishing and malware protection, continuous monitoring of user activities and file sharing, and more.