Looking for a recommendation: Sharing files with organizations that block Google. | C2C Community
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Looking for a recommendation: Sharing files with organizations that block Google.


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Does anybody have a recommended solution that help them securely send content to organizations that block access to Google/Google Drive? Ideally something that can integrate with Google so that our users can easily invoke the solution to send content. 

Ideally depending on the sensitivity of the content the content may or may not require a login to access, a unique link may suffice.  

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Best answer by Krishanr 7 March 2022, 18:44

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@Krishanr While not a direct answer.. a question you may ask thoses organisaitons.. do they allow acces to BOX, Dropbox or external sharepoints? or even sites such a wetransfert ?

If the answer is yes to any of them, then you can open the discussion on Google Drive, the better security, the enhanced collaboration and tracability… and that creating a google account, is essentially the same as creating a dropbox account. (and it is NOT required to create a Gmail account when creating a Goolge Account)…

 

thoses are generally the first questions I ask when confronted to this situation...

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Hi,

Have you tried our product, Overdrive.io? It allows you to create a website from a Drive folder. To achieve what you want you could invite non-Google users to sign in with Microsoft, Facebook or just a username and password. Depending on sensitivity, you can share the folder of files to anyone with the link which would allow them to be viewed by the users.

 

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thank you for your answers @alan.muntadas and @markphwilliams 

@Krishanr Did you try what Alan and Mark suggest?

@PaulRLees what do you suggest?

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Hi,

Have you tried our product, Overdrive.io? It allows you to create a website from a Drive folder. To achieve what you want you could invite non-Google users to sign in with Microsoft, Facebook or just a username and password. Depending on sensitivity, you can share the folder of files to anyone with the link which would allow them to be viewed by the users.

 

is overdrive using any Google IP’s or domains when accessing the hosted content @markphwilliams

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@dominikkugelmann we use the Google Drive api and the site owners domain, when you set up an Overdrive site we ask for Drive scopes. Is that what you meant?

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@alan.muntadas  Thank for your response. We wont be able to change the security posture of these organizations and there are many (i.e financial institutions) and unfortunately. Google does not have a way to uniquely identify instances when sharing content.  similar to how headers exist that allow you to restrict login to a specific tenant. I’ve spoke to our rep about this and they have submitted a feature request for us. 

As this does not exist with Google, an ideal file sharing solution would have to be able to uniquely identify our instance such that we can request the organization to only allow sharing form our tenant.  

 

@markphwilliams thanks for your response, I took a look at the product, I don’t think it will fit this use case, but I may be looking at a virtual data room for another project. 

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@Krishanr if that reticent organisation set up a “small” workspace tenant (without email for example) eg enterprise essentials.. they could set up dedicated whitelisted Google domains for sharing arcosss tenants. i do know some of the larger Workspace clients (such as airbus) are doing this to be able to contol who can share content with them from a google workspace environement.

This would allow that organisation to control the data flow, and not have to use the Google workspace tools to the full capability.

some education on cloud security fot those organisaitons would also be useful :)

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@dominikkugelmann we use the Google Drive api and the site owners domain, when you set up an Overdrive site we ask for Drive scopes. Is that what you meant?

No.  The question was related to what IP addresses and Domains you use to serve your content.

ie. When i go to an overdrive page will I be hitting any of Google’s Domains or IPs? 

Because if that is the case, than your product might still be getting blocked from being accessed. 

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Thanks @alan.muntadas  . Our Google rep suggested we manage a tenant for file share access as a work around. Not ideal to manage identities and licenses for external clients in this fashion.   The avenue it looks like we are going to peruse is utilizing additional features of our Enterprise  MFT platform . We have it deployed for SFTP but it has a connector to Google Drive and allows users to send a secure link to a document to a external person. 

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Hi @Krishanr - omniindex.io have a Google Workspace Add on that uses a private block chain with fully homomorphic encryption to provide you with file system that is immutable, and distributed, with a Google Workspace front end for docs, sheets and slides where accessible and a blockchain anywhere else. Access to blockchains can be managed by the Workspace admin etc.

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Hi @Krishanr - omniindex.io have a Google Workspace Add on that uses a private block chain with fully homomorphic encryption to provide you with file system that is immutable, and distributed, with a Google Workspace front end for docs, sheets and slides where accessible and a blockchain anywhere else. Access to blockchains can be managed by the Workspace admin etc.

Hi just to pile in on this. (I work at OmniIndex) We do have a Blockchain that does exactly that. It does also isolate shared files to only those that an admin allows access to. Storage (The blockchain) can be on a different tenancy and so not stored within Drive. Please feel free to reach out. I am sure we can put together a trial for you that does not interfere with any of your current systems, so your IT department can say yeah that works or no get it away from me. ;-)

Simon

 

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