Bring Enhanced Security and Visibility to Your Google Apps Domain with Apps Explorer

Today, we’re very pleased to announce the general availability of our cloud application access dashboard, Apps Explorer. First released in beta late last year, Apps Explorer is now available to all FlashPanel Enterprise customers.

The dashboard is the first of its kind to provide IT administrators with the ability to monitor and control the use of third-party applications installed via the Google Apps Marketplace, Chrome Web Store, Google Play Store, Apple’s App Store and others.

Though the cloud has brought tremendous benefits to workers around the world like the ability to access data from any device and install applications that enhance overall productivity, it has left many IT departments fearing the worst. In order to safeguard corporate data in the cloud, many organizations seek to lock down their environments, severely limiting the benefits working in the cloud provides. Using Apps Explorer, IT can allow users to freely browse and install applications of their choosing while maintaining corporate governance and authority over Google Apps data.

Using Apps Explorer, IT administrators can:

• • View and monitor applications installed via the Google Apps Marketplace, Chrome Web Store, Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store through a single pane of glass

• • Whitelist or blacklist applications on a user by user or domain-wide basis. After an application is blacklisted, permissions to access Google Apps domain data are automatically revoked

• • Enforce automated SaaS application compliance policies based on specific criteria like permissions requested and scope, giving users the freedom to browse and install products that add value, while allowing administrators to prohibit unsafe applications from leeching company data

• • View exposures and potential vulnerabilities based on the level of permissions granted: Read and / or Write to Google Drive, Gmail, Directory and more

• View application installation frequency. Commonly installed applications can then be considered by the IT department for widespread deployment and usage throughout an entire organization.

For more information on Apps Explorer’s new compliance policies, check out the FlashPanel blog here.