American Lung Association of New England

Streamline IT Operations with Visibility and Control of all the Documents in­ the Google Apps Domain

Eric McDuffee, Senior Director of Technology and Administration chose CloudLock for Google Apps to help streamline daily operations in his organization’s Google Docs environment.

The American Lung Association of New England (ALANE) serves Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont. They are part of the American Lung Association, the oldest voluntary health agency in the U.S.

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The American Lung Association of New England focuses on healthy air, tobacco control and all lung disease, including asthma and COPD. Their mission is to save lives by improving lung health and preventing lung disease through education, research and advocacy. Since 1904, this organization has been saving lives by helping people quit smoking, funding research, advocating for healthy air, and educating millions about asthma.

The American Lung Association of New England is a not-for-profit organization supported through public donations and volunteers at all levels.

Business Problem

ALANE migrated to Google Apps in 2007 and, after completing a migration and consolidation project, is using one domain for all its employees, interns and volunteers across all branches. Google Apps has been fully adopted throughout the organization, providing effective collaboration via Google Docs.

“While we were seeing an immediate benefit from the increased collaboration and sharing of documents in Google Apps, we lacked the visibility and control we needed to effectively manage access and sharing permissions,” said Eric McDuffee, Senior Director of Technology and Administration for ALANE.

“Documents created and stored in our Google Docs contain donor and volunteer information, and it is our responsibility to ensure that those documents are shared correctly,” said McDuffee.

To support the users in all branches and efficiently run IT operations, the IT team realized they needed additional administrative tools to perform their job.

The CloudLock Solution

Enabling CloudLock allowed the IT team at ALANE to realize operational efficiencies and gain back the administrative controls needed to support their Google Docs users.
“CloudLock for Google Apps allows me to gain the visibility and control of all the documents in our domain, and gives me the tools I need to run IT operations and support my users on a daily basis,” said McDuffee.

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

• 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)
• Transfer ownership of documents from one user to another (in bulk or for a single file)
• 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

When a Google Apps domain administrator deletes a user account, the documents owned by that user are deleted automatically. This leads many organizations to ‘suspend’ accounts instead of deleting them, requiring companies to keep and often pay for orphaned accounts for employees that are no longer there.

“The transfer ownership feature in CloudLock lets me change ownership of documents for employees who have left, and I can safely decommission their accounts without worrying about losing documents,” said McDuffee.

“We also tend to recycle Google apps accounts for our interns. This way every time an internship ends, I just transfer the documents that an intern has created and prep the account for the next one,” McDuffee added.

Full Control of Document Permissions

CloudLock’s document permissions features let the domain’s Google Apps admin:

• Add collaborators
• Change ownership
• Change collaborator access rights

“Being able to add collaborators to a document allows me to provide quick and effective support for my users, as I often need to grant urgent access to documents that I am not a collaborator on. Without CloudLock, I wouldn’t be able to do that,” said McDuffee.

CloudLock provides IT with the visibility and control of all the documents in the Google Apps domain without the need to be shared on these documents. IT can easily secure access rights or grant access as needed while all changes made are recorded in an audit log.

Ongoing Monitoring of All Documents in the Domain

“As a nonprofit organization, we want to be as transparent as possible with our donors and volunteers and Google Apps is great for transparency. But we still need to have the controls in place to make sure sensitive information is not shared mistakenly,” said McDuffee.

CloudLock provides ongoing monitoring of the entire domain with email alerts on newly exposed documents and changes in permissions for existing documents. The same report is also available from within the application with the ability view the specific documents.

With this feature, Google Apps administrators can stay on top of all changes in the domain with a minimal time investment.

Visibility and Control In the Cloud

For organizations looking to leverage Google Docs as their cloud file server, CloudLock is the only enterprise cloud data protection solution that enables control of data while gaining the collaboration and cost savings benefits of Google Apps.