Earlier this week Google fixed a security problem
affecting itsGoogle Docs application suitethat
caused users to inadvertently share documents.
Industry experts argue that the issue highlights the problem
with using free services on the internet. "You get what you pay
for. It is like saying someone gave me a car and the first time I
took it to the garage I had a £1,000 service," said Clive
Longbottom, service director for business process analysis at
Quocirca. "If you can put up with the issues,
Google Docs is a perfectly good tool."
However, he warns that if users believe that a free application
is offering some intrinsic value to their business, they need to
seriously consider running it in-house, or pay a service provider
to offer a contract with an SLA.
For the future, Longbottom suggests Google may offer a premium
service with extra security and service levels. He says, "You
cannot expect commercial levels of security when you are not paying
for the software."
Capgemini,which sells enterprise support for Google, has played
down the security risk, saying, "Whilst any issue of this sort is
undesirable, Google Apps compares very well with more conventional
file-oriented systems where e-mails, memory sticks and human
behaviours pose significant ongoing threats."
What happened
Google said the bug affected document sharing on Google Docs.
The problem occurred when the document owner, or a collaborator
with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations
from the documents list and then changed the sharing permissions in
Google Docs.
Google has now run an automated process to remove collaborators
and viewers from the documents that it identified as having been
affected. "We then e-mailed the document owners to point them to
their affected documents in case they need to re-share them,"
Google said. Some users have complained the fix has stopped them
collaborating on shared documents.