Google Drive for Work and Apps for Education getting plethora of new security features

Google has today announced that it’s bringing new sharing controls, alerts and “audit events” to both Google Drive for Work and Google for Education over the coming weeks. Security is one of the biggest concerns that companies have about moving their data to the cloud, and Google hopes these new features will help make the transition just a little bit easier…

On the Drive for Work side, Google is bringing the ability to set sharing settings by department. With this, you’ll be able to turn off sharing outside the main domain for one unit within the company, but still allow others to work and share files with anyone in others. You can still keep sharing restricted to users in the domain, those on a specified list of trusted domains, or open to be shared completely. But now you can set these depending on organizational unit.

Similarly, for Apps for Education, Google will be adding a new “trusted domains” feature that will “allow schools to extend Drive sharing and Classroom participation to domains they choose.” Configuring this list of trusted domains will let teachers use Classroom if their school has multiple domains, and it will also be possible for students to join Classroom from different domains—like if a student is taking classes through a college.

Other features are coming to both platforms over the coming weeks as well, including the ability for users to reset their own passwords, Information Rights Management for Drive for Work customers, custom administrator alerts, the ability to share to outside your organization much more easily, and more. Check out the video below for a quick overview.