Egnyte enhances customer data security and control in Google Workspace with SADA Services

Increasing focus on securing sensitive data

In the digital age, data is a critical asset, and businesses increasingly focus on managing and securing it. The volume of data is overwhelming—akin to a vast warehouse and managing it without an inventory of the merchandise. Data comes with significant responsibilities, particularly in organization and security. Data leaks and compliance issues pose serious risks, prompting a need for a comprehensive solution.

To help protect, organize, and manage customers’ data, Egnyte, a leading platform for content collaboration, intelligence, and governance, recognized the need and importance of secure data management, especially for Google Workspace customers.

“We have many customers who use Google Workspace, which includes Google Drive and Gmail,” says Ram Boreda, VP of Products at Egnyte. “They also use Egnyte to store some of their high-value data, but they have hundreds or thousands of users who use Gmail and Google Drive.”

Business challenge

Desiring more granular control over data

As companies increasingly leverage the cloud for data storage, the security landscape naturally evolves to encompass more complex considerations, including data loss, governance, and regulatory compliance. 

For Egnyte customers who use Google Drive and Gmail, many of them also desire more granular control over their data. Thus, Egnyte sought to enhance their Google Workspace integration, focusing on improved file management, security event monitoring, and access control within shared Google Drives. Key considerations that customers needed addressed included:

• Increased visibility with more comprehensive insights into what data was stored and shared within Google Drive and Gmail
• Extended data protection coverage to enforce more granular security policies and prevent sensitive data exfiltration
• Adherence to regulatory and compliance requirements like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI 
• Ability to navigate multicloud complexity with consistent security policies across multiple cloud environments (e.g., Egnyte, Google Cloud, Azure, AWS)

“Customers face the challenge of protecting their very sensitive data that sits in Google Cloud,” says Boreda. “We are providing this additional layer of security, visibility, and control for customers’ mission-critical data in Google Drive and Gmail. We built a solution for this challenge so customers have additional options for visibility and control of their sensitive data.”

Solution

To help find a solution for their customers’ data security and governance needs, Egnyte collaborated with SADA, An Insight company and multiple-time Google Cloud Partner of the Year, who was referred by Google Cloud, to develop a solution. 

“Our Google Cloud partner program manager said, ‘You should work with SADA, they have a lot of experience. Let them help you build the solution,’” says Boreda. “Time to market was important and Google Cloud recommended SADA. After talking to SADA, we felt very comfortable they understood what we wanted to build, so we engaged them.”

Labeling content for security, data loss prevention, governance, and access

The solution for Egnyte was to create a data labeling system for all content in a customer’s Google Workspace instance, including Gmail and Google Drive. Leveraging Google APIs would prove crucial so the solution could parse all the data and continue to work effectively as content volumes expand. Key elements of the solution included:

• SADA helping Egnyte engineers integrate the Google Workspace, Google Drive, and Gmail APIs to collect event data, understand user actions, and enforce data loss prevention (DLP) policies
• Utilization of Google Cloud’s Sensitive Data Protection (SDP) API for content classification and labeling, enabling precise control over sensitive data
• Custom application development by SADA in building a web application to provide a user-friendly interface for managing Google Workspace events and DLP actions
• Design of a scalable architecture for handling petabytes of data, ensuring performance and reliability for Egnyte’s enterprise customers
• Close collaboration between Egnyte and SADA’s onshore and offshore teams, including daily technical sessions and weekly demos, to ensure alignment with business objectives and facilitate rapid iteration

“SADA, with their expertise and experience implementing so many solutions on Google Cloud, really helped us,” says Boreda. “SADA helped us uncover all the APIs that we should use, developed prototype code for us, and helped optimize how we’d invoke these APIs. The SADA team was very good at working with us and being flexible with our needs.”

Delivering a Java-based library solution

In response to Egnyte’s Google Workspace content labeling needs, SADA successfully delivered a comprehensive solution, including:

• Creating a Java library to streamline Google Workspace integration with:
  • Event data collectors to monitor document visibility changes, access modifications, and security events
  • An action methodology developed to execute critical operations such as ownership transfers, permission removals, and security controls
  • A reference Java Spring Boot app to demo integration patterns and library usage
• Quality assurance control to ensure code reliability through:
  • Comprehensive unit tests using JUnit 5 and Mockito Java testing frameworks
  • Maven-based test automation with coverage exceeding 75%

“The SADA team researched and prototyped our solution leveraging the Google Workspace API,” says Boreda. “SADA helped us understand the events that are generated when a user takes an action like creating, editing, sharing, deleting, or downloading content. Each of these actions generates a number of events.” 

SADA’s solution enables Egnyte to understand generated events, extract them in bulk from Google Drive, and utilize the Google Workspace API to determine if the events are unusual and/or should be prevented from recurring. “SADA helped us uncover the different events—specifically for Google Drive and Gmail—and showed us the API calls to retrieve them,” says Boreda.

Impact

As a result of collaborating with SADA, Egnyte was able to achieve significant results, enhancing their customers’ data security and governance capabilities within Google Workspace. SADA’s assistance enabled Egnyte to provide their customers with granular visibility and control over their data, improved data protection, and streamlined operations. 

These advancements not only bolstered customer confidence but also shortened Egnyte’s time to value for critical security solutions. Specifically, Egnyte achieved:

• Enhanced security posture for customers with granular visibility and control over Google Workspace data, enabling DLP policies and compliance with regs like GDPR and HIPAA
• Improved data protection through a data-centric approach to DLP, complementing existing transport-layer solutions and offering a more precise way to protect sensitive information
• Accelerated time to market based on SADA’s Google Cloud expertise and efficient project management, which enabled Egnyte to develop and deploy the solution within eight weeks
• Scalability for handling petabytes of customers’ Google Drive data, which is essential as customer data volumes grow to accommodate current needs and future expansion
• Positive feedback from early testing, with strong interest from large enterprise customers

“Our customers will definitely realize and understand the value of implementing this solution,” says Boreda. “They feel very confident about their data on Egnyte, and this solution seamlessly extends that same level of confidence and visibility to their data within Google Workspace.”

Overall, Egnyte’s collaboration with SADA on this Google Workspace security solution exemplifies the power of strategic collaboration and cloud technology. This initiative not only reinforces Egnyte’s market position but also their commitment to providing secure and compliant content management solutions for a single view of risk.