A Google employee talks about the security of the service

Dec 11, 2006 07:40 GMT  ·  By

Google Search Appliance is an important part of Google Enterprise solutions that is meant to provide powerful service for all corporate users. The product provided by Google offers a well-developed search engine for all business users, including support for 220 different file formats and 109 different languages.

Recently, Mark Bennett published an article to discuss some important facts of Enterprise Search and the implementation of the system. Because the author talked about the importance of document level security, a Google employee posted a message on the blog to agree with Mark and add some main ideas about the system.

"While we agree with Mark on some of the benefits with using early-binding security filtering, there are certain limitations that make it impractical (if not impossible) to use for most deployments today," Nitin Mangtani, Google Search Appliance Product Manager sustained. "One of the main issues with early-binding is synchronization with the access control list (ACL) policies stored in content systems. ACL policies change frequently, and caching the ACL policies results in policies being out-of-sync with the source system. This can cause severe breaches in company security and allow sensitive IP to be leaked within the organization," he also added.

The Google employee mentioned that companies are encountering difficulties in the implementation process because they need a standard way of reading policies from source systems. It seems like the new MOSS 2007 search system is one of the examples because it focuses the security on the Sharepoint content and not on other databases or web servers.

Nitin Mangtani concluded that until the company provides a security filter solution, the giant search engine is offering every day millions of secure search results to the companies in the entire world.