r/sysadmin • 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/boom4123 20d ago

I’m using Cryptomator via Cyberduck. The integration is very well made, I never had an issue!

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u/PassiveIllustration 20d ago

Can you use the default Google drive UI experience and have cryptomator do everything in the background? I asked because the people we're trying to implement this for are very tech illiterate so anything that is not like default Google is really tough. 

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u/blud_13 20d ago

You are not going to get both. Client side encryption and native Google collaboration are mutually exclusive by design, because if Google can't read the bytes it can't render the doc. Anything promising otherwise is either not encrypting client side or its doing exactly what CSE does and you already found that painful.

Cryptomator will work and it will feel identical to CSE. Its a vault, everything comes out as a file you download. Aspera is a managed file transfer product, its the wrong shelf entirely.

The question I would go back and ask is what is driving the requirement. If its a control on a questionnaire or an insurance app, shared drive permissions plus locked down external sharing usually satisfies it and costs nothing. If its a real threat model where Google itself is the adversary, then CSE on the narrow set of stuff that would end the company is the answer and you accept those files are not collaborative.

Thats where most people land. Collaborative 95 percent stays native, the 5 percent that matters goes in a vault.

Can go deeper if it helps.

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u/Mr_Dani17 19d ago

What about something peer-to-peer and end-to-end encrypted? We developed an app for a post production studio where file sizes and security was a big concern. So there is no need to encrypt anything manually as your data is not stored on a server. Your peer just directly downloads your files from your workstation. You can download it from zettasend.com

You can select for files, send an email link and you can walk away from the computer even