Replace Point-in-Time Audits of Google Drive with Always-On Detection and Response

Google Drive is at the core of how we collaborate today, but its dynamic nature makes it nearly impossible to secure with traditional methods. Point-in-time audits are obsolete the moment they are completed, leaving you blind to new risks. Material provides continuous monitoring for your data in Drive, turning a reactive, manual process into a proactive, automated one.

Problem: Periodic audits can't keep up

Relying on quarterly or even monthly audits of Google Drive is like trying to guard a bank by checking the security cameras once a week. The environment changes by the minute, and a static snapshot of permissions and data is immediately out of date. This leaves security teams struggling with significant blind spots in an era where threat actors are looking to exploit these gaps more aggressively.

This approach creates compounding risks:

• Data is dynamic: Every day, employees create, upload, and share thousands of files. A clean report from last week provides zero assurance that a sensitive document wasn't just made public by accident five minutes ago.
• "Toxic combinations" are hidden: The greatest risk isn’t just sensitive data or a public link in isolation; it’s the combination of the two. Google Workspace’s native security and traditional DLP tools lack the context to connect these dots, forcing teams to manually cross-reference data to find the real threats.
• Manual toil and burnout: Running scripts or manually spot-checking files is an inefficient use of your security team's time. It doesn't scale with your organization's data growth and leads to inevitable human error.
• Compliance fire drills: When an audit for SOC 2, HIPAA, or GDPR is on the horizon, teams are forced into a stressful, last-minute scramble to find and remediate issues, rather than simply proving an already-secure posture.

Solution: Continuous visibility and automated response

Material replaces the ineffective cycle of periodic audits with a real-time, continuous security program for your data in Google Drive. By monitoring content and permissions 24/7, Material allows you to find and fix risks as they happen.

Here’s how Material solves the problem:

• Always-on monitoring: Material continuously scans Google Drive for new files, changes to existing content, and modifications to sharing permissions. You get a live, up-to-the-minute view of your data risk, not an outdated snapshot.
• Context-aware risk detection: The platform automatically classifies data and analyzes sharing settings in tandem. It surfaces the truly critical risks by identifying toxic combinations—like a spreadsheet containing PII that is shared with a personal gmail.com address or a folder of legal documents accessible to anyone with the link.
• Automated and guided remediation: Drastically reduce your team's workload. Material can be configured with automated policies to revoke public links on newly discovered sensitive documents. For other issues, it provides one-click workflows that allow an analyst to notify the file owner or revoke access directly from the Material console.

An audit-ready posture: Turn compliance from a periodic fire drill into a state of continuous readiness. With Material, you can confidently demonstrate to auditors that you have an active, robust program for discovering and mitigating data exposure risks in your cloud workspace.