Data classification in Google Workspace allows us to apply a variety of different labels to your files in Google Drive. This allows you to better organise and categorise your data, as well as enhancing content protection at scale.

Why it’s important

Sensitive data needs special handling. We can support a strong information governance policy by helping you to label files which may contain sensitive intellectual property, personally identifiable information, or data subject to special compliance regulations.

We can also help prevent external sharing, downloading and printing of classified files through the use of data loss prevention (DLP) rules. This is particularly useful for large organisations and our world of increasingly remote workforces. 

The labelling of files can also be used in conjunction with automated classification, based on administrator-defined rules and predefined content detectors. Using this automated classification we can help you scale data classification quickly and easily, and remove some of the common human errors.

How to use Drive labels and DLP

We can help you use Drive labels and Drive data loss prevention integration in a number of different ways.

• Drive labels can help you classify the sensitivity level of your files, so that you can control internal or external access. The Drive labels feature enables us to configure custom labels (formerly “metadata”) for a domain, and then enable users to apply these labels to files in Drive. We can create labels to indicate department names, document types, document status, project types and many other things - which also helps your team more easily find what they’re looking for in advanced search.
  
• Automated classification and data loss prevention (DLP) can automatically add Drive labels to content based on rules defined by an administrator. This can help keep your data secure and prevent external sharing, downloading or printing of specified files. We can help implement automated classification to scale your use of labels and lower the risk of manual classification errors (aka human error!) We can also help you define some retention rules so that you can control how long files are stored for before they may be automatically deleted if required.

Could your organisation benefit from data classification but you could use some advice or help implementing it? Drop your email below if you're interested - we'll get back to you!