The Academy of Contemporary Music

Monitoring and Alerting for Sensitive and Business Critical Documents in Google Docs

The Academy of Contemporary Music chooses CloudLock for Google Apps to manage business critical documents in Google Docs and ensure that confidential infrmation remains confidential.

ACM is a world leader in music industry education, and has developed some of the most innovative music industry education currently available. ACM offers full and part time courses in Guitar, Bass, Drums, Vocals, Keyboards, Music Production, Creative Sound Design, Tour Production & Management and Music Business.

Students can enroll in a part time entry level beginners course or a ground-breaking full time course, and receive the best possible vocational training from internationally acclaimed faculty and have access to some of the finest educational facilities available in the world.

The ACM’s innovative approach did not skip the IT department as it constantly advances the technologies and tools used by the academy’s staff and students.

Business Problem

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Once the ACM moved to the cloud for email and collaboration, the IT team quickly realized the cost benefits of using Google Apps for Education. The collaboration suite also provided information sharing benefits, and was quickly adopted throughout the academy.

“We started using Google Docs A LOT and that was fine to begin with,” said Simon Mallindine, IT Manager at the Academy of Contemporary Music. “But when people moved and we closed their accounts, we realized that we also lost their data.”

Facing this operational challenge, Mallindine started looking for a tool that would provide him with the ability to control and manage the ACM’s rapidly growing Google Docs environment.

The CloudLock Solution

Enabling CloudLock allowed the IT team at ACM to control and manage the documents stored in Google Docs to fully realize the benefits of collaboration in the cloud.

With CloudLock for Google Apps, the IT team is able to:

• Monitor and receive exposure alerts, getting email alerts with newly exposed documents and changes in permissions (the same report is also available from within the application)
• Transfer ownership of documents from one user to another (in bulk or for a single file)
• Gain visibility into all the documents in the domain and see their sharing settings
• Fully control document permissions (add or remove collaborators, change ownership and change collaborator access rights)

Monitoring and Alerts When Exposures and Permissions Change

“The feature we found was most useful is that every day we get a report that shows us the internal exposures, public exposures, and gives us an overview of the entire document sharing situation,” said Mallindine.

ACM faced a problem where confidential documents were inadvertently shared with the entire domain. As an organization that stores all its documents in the cloud – including sensitive and business critical documents – CloudLock for Google Docs provides on-going monitoring of the entire domain and sends email alerts on newly exposed documents and changes in permissions for existing documents.

With this feature, Google Apps administrators can stay on top of all changes in the domain with a minimal time investment. The same report is also available from within the application, with the ability to define a time range for changes and provides the ability to view specific documents.

Transferring Ownership of Documents

When a Google Apps domain administrator deletes a user account, the documents owned by that user are deleted automatically causing the organization to lose the data owned by that user.

The ACM experienced this problem after closing the accounts of employees who left the organization. “Immediately after closing the accounts we realized that we lost all the documents that these users owned, without the ability to recover it, and had no easy way to transition hundreds of documents to another user,” said Mallindine

This data loss triggered the need to find a solution to provides IT with the administrative tools to effectively manage and control Google Docs. The ACM found that CloudLock – an application available directly on the Google Apps marketplace and running on Apps Engine – provides the comprehensive solution they need.

Permissions Management in the Cloud

With CloudLock for Google Docs, domain administrators are able to centrally manage Google Docs permissions for all documents in the domain (even if they not a collaborator on some documents). The control and visibility that comes with CloudLock into all the data in the domain, includes:

• Detailed ACL views
• Full control to change, revoke and add collaborators
• Privileged document view for audit and compliance (recorded in audit trail)

“By using CloudLock, I was able to go in and change permissions to documents in my domain so that confidential documents remain confidential. This makes our lives so much easier and allows us to use Google Docs and Google Apps for business critical information,” said Mallindine.

A Google Apps Marketplace Application Running on Google App Engine

CloudLock for Google Apps is available directly from the Google Apps Marketplace and runs on Google App Engine. This ensures that all meta-data collected and all application processing remain within the same SAS70-II certified environment that supports Google Email, Calendar, Docs and other applications.

As a Google Apps Marketplace application, the product is easy to install, uses OpenID for single sign-on and SSL for all communications.