Google just announced availability of Data Loss Prevention in Gmail for Google Apps Unlimited customers. The company plans to bring it to Google Drive in the coming year.

“Workers are constantly creating and sharing new ideas, and keeping these ideas safe needs to be simple, quick and reliable,” says Suzanne Frey, Director, Security, Trust, and Privacy for Google Apps. “Google for Work already helps admins manage information security with encryption, audit reports, sharing controls, mobile management and two-factor authentication. But sometimes mistakes happen; for example, you might hit “Reply all” when meaning to send a private message. So today, if you’re a Google Apps Unlimited customer, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Gmail will add another layer of protection to prevent sensitive information from being revealed to those who shouldn’t have it.”

“Organizations may have a policy that the Sales department should not share customer credit card information with vendors,” she adds. “And to keep information safe, admins can easily set up a DLP policy by selecting “Credit Card Numbers” from a library of predefined content detectors. Gmail DLP will automatically check all outgoing emails from the sales department and take action based on what the admin has specified: either quarantine the email for review, tell users to modify the information, or block the email from being sent and notify the sender. These checks don’t just apply to email text, but also to content inside common attachment types―such as documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. And admins can also create custom rules with keywords and regular expressions.”

Google has a data loss prevention whitepaper available here. You can also read this post, which looks at some of the company’s efforts throughout the past year.

Google will be discussing electronic crime, security, and privacy at the Enigma conference on January 25th.

Images via Google