You can always trust your internal users with business-critical data, right? As much as you would like to answer yes to that question, insider threats to data account for many of the disaster recovery scenarios experienced by your business.
This can lead to business continuity being affected. Whether accidental or intentional, the deletion of data by your internal employees is one of the many risks that comprise what is known as insider threats that come from otherwise authorized personnel.
While many of the top security headlines focus on the threats that come from the outside, the insider threats to data that exist among your own legitimate, authorized employees can arguably equal or surpass the threats that come from the outside. In this post, we will take a look at how you can protect your Google G Suite environment from data loss as a result of insider threats using proper backups of G Suite data.
What Is Considered an Insider Threat?
There are really two kinds of intentional data deletion. There is intentional data deletion of business-critical data that is the result of an employee who with innocent intent, accidentally deletes the wrong data or data they assumed they could safely delete that turned out to be critical to business continuity. The other kind of intentional data deletion is with malicious intent. In this type of intentional data deletion, the employee knows full well the data they are deleting is important to the business. Due to malicious intent or after receiving notice of termination, the unscrupulous employee deletes data they know will negatively affect business continuity.
In each case of data loss with intentional data deletion, the end result of the data loss is the same – disrupted business continuity. However, as is often the case, when data is deleted with malicious intent or other unscrupulous reasons, the scope of the data loss is generally greater than in case of accidental data deletion. This is not true in every case, however, in general, this can certainly prove to be true.
These types of events are rightly deemed Insider Threats as regardless of the intent, data loss coming from employee actions can quickly cause a business to lose continuity of operations.
If we think about a common scenario of an employee who has access to G Suite Team Drives. The files that exist inside the Team Drives service is shared between numerous employees. Any files that a single employee deletes who has permissions to do so, can affect the productivity of the entire team of employees. The employee could potentially delete documents or spreadsheets that are used in everyday activities of the organization.
Is Your G Suite Safe from Insider Threats?
There is a tremendous shortage of capabilities to recover data across all the major public cloud vendors and their Software-as-a-Service offerings. Google’s G Suite environment is no exception to this rule. G Suite has only a limited number of abilities to recover data. It is important for organizations to understand that data loss as a result of insider threats may not be recoverable by the native recovery features found in G Suite.
With only the ability to recover restore points up to 30-days for files stored in G Suite storage that have been changed and a limited ability to recover data that has been outright deleted, the recoverability of G Suite cloud storage is very limited. Additionally, these native recovery mechanisms only cover G Suite storage and no other services in the G Suite cloud. Businesses need more powerful options.
Spinbackup – Effective G Suite Backup
Businesses must take the protection of their data seriously when storing it in public cloud storage found in Software-as-a-Service offerings such as G Suite. Native features for recovering data as a result of insider threats fall far short of what is needed. Spinbackup’s powerful data protection platform for Google G Suite provides enterprise-grade protection for G Suite public cloud environments. Spinbackup’s data protection features for Google G suite include:
- Automated daily backups – 1x or 3x a day
- Unlimited versions of G Suite backups
- Easy recovery or download of backup data
- Protects all of the G Suite services and not just G Suite cloud storage
- Encrypts backup data in-flight and at-rest
- “Restore in a time machine” functionality provides DVR type functionality for file restores
- Incorporates a powerful “Insider Threats” cybersecurity protection module that helps prevent insider threats before they happen
Check out Spinbackup’s G Suite Data Protection providing powerful backups and recovery of G Suite data.
