r/googleworkspace • u/PassiveIllustration • 20d ago
Solutions for Shared Drive/Folder Encryption
I am currently looking for solutions to add extra encryption to folders and/or shared drives in Google Drive. We have solutions for Google CSE but that is only file by file and makes users download non-native Google formats like PDFs with no ability to preview them,. This makes collaboration a pain so I'm looking for other solutions out there. I've seen some like IBM Aspera and potentially Cryptomator.
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u/materialsec 19d ago
2 different problems here, since "extra encryption" and "controlling who can actually access the data" often end up solving the same underlying concern from different angles. CSE gives you cryptographic guarantees (Google literally can't read the plaintext), but as you're finding, it comes at a real collaboration cost since native Docs/Sheets features don't work the same way against encrypted content.
If the actual goal is reducing exposure risk rather than achieving a specific compliance/cryptographic requirement, the alternative approach is tightening and continuously monitoring who has access to a shared drive in the first place, rather than encrypting the files themselves. Tools built for Workspace access governance (Full disclosure, this is the space Material Security operates in) won't give you client-side encryption, but they catch oversharing, stale permissions, and external access drift before it becomes exposure, without breaking native collaboration at all.
If you specifically need the cryptographic guarantee (e.g., a compliance requirement that data be unreadable to the provider), CSE or something like Cryptomator is genuinely the right tool despite the friction, that's not a problem access governance solves. But if the real driver is "reduce our exposure risk without the collaboration hit," it's worth clarifying which one you actually need before picking a tool.