Choosing a Secure Cloud File System: OneDrive, SharePoint, or Google Drive?

Choosing between OneDrive, SharePoint, and Google Drive is rarely about whether the cloud is “secure.” Microsoft and Google run mature, heavily defended infrastructures, and both encrypt data at rest and in transit, support MFA and SSO, and maintain long lists of compliance attestations. The security gap usually shows up in how the platform is configured, how sharing is governed, and how identity and endpoints are managed day to day.

For organizations in Sacramento and surrounding areas, including healthcare groups juggling EMR workflows, the right choice is the one you can operate safely with your staffing, audit requirements, and collaboration patterns.

Start with the real comparison: product model and risk surface

OneDrive, SharePoint, and Google Drive overlap, but they are not interchangeable.

OneDrive (in Microsoft 365) is best thought of as a user’s file vault with sharing and sync. It shines when people need offline access and simple collaboration, but it can turn into scattered, user-owned silos if you do not set retention and ownership rules.

SharePoint Online is a team and records platform: document libraries tied to sites, Microsoft 365 Groups, and (often) Teams. It can be locked down tightly, but the permission model is more complex, and complexity is where mistakes happen.

Google Drive (in Google Workspace) sits between the two models. My Drive is user-centric, while Shared Drives are team-centric and easier to govern when set up correctly. Many security outcomes in Google Drive depend on how aggressively you move shared content into Shared Drives and how you restrict link sharing.

A single sentence that saves time in planning: if you want team-owned content with controlled lifecycle, treat SharePoint sites or Google Shared Drives as the default, not personal storage.

Baseline security is strong on both sides, but “baseline” is not the goal

At the infrastructure layer, both vendors cover the basics well: encryption at rest, TLS in transit, resilient data centers, and continuous patching for the SaaS service. Where buyers feel differences is at the control layer: identity conditional policies, endpoint requirements for sync, and governance tooling that matches how the business actually collaborates.

One practical note that matters for risk conversations: recent high-profile SharePoint exploits widely reported in the news have centered on on-premises SharePoint Server, not SharePoint Online. That does not make cloud immune to breach, but it changes the operational burden. Hosting collaboration services on-prem can increase patch urgency and shrink the margin for error.

A security-focused feature map (what matters in audits and incident response)

The table below summarizes the controls that usually drive outcomes for SMB and mid-market environments, including regulated clinics and professional services firms.

Licensing matters. Many of the “security features” people assume are included (advanced DLP, longer audit retention, richer eDiscovery) only show up in higher tiers.

OneDrive vs SharePoint: the security differences inside Microsoft 365

A lot of risk comes from treating OneDrive and SharePoint as the same storage with different icons.

OneDrive is tied to a person. When that person leaves, you need a clean offboarding workflow: transfer ownership, preserve content under retention, and remove shared links. If you do not, sensitive documents can linger under accounts that are disabled but still retain sharing artifacts.

SharePoint content is tied to a site and group. That usually makes governance easier: you can standardize site templates, apply labels and retention to the site, and manage membership through a group rather than one-off shares.

SharePoint’s power is also its sharp edge. Permission inheritance breaks, unique permissions at deep folder levels, and ad hoc site creation can make it hard to answer basic questions during an audit: “Who has access to this folder right now?” The fix is not avoiding SharePoint. The fix is designing an information architecture that matches the business and limiting who can create sites and sharing links.

After you decide where content should live, the next decision is how people access it.

• Sync strategy: Permit sync broadly and rely on endpoint controls, or limit sync to managed devices only.
• External collaboration: Allow guests with controls, or require partner accounts and tighter approval.
• Records and retention: Decide what must be retained, what must be deleted, and what must be immutable.

Google Drive’s security story: My Drive vs Shared Drives is the fork in the road

Google Drive can be very secure, and it can also become a sprawl of user-owned documents with permissive links if you do not take a stance early.

My Drive is flexible and convenient, and that convenience can quietly undermine governance. When content stays in My Drive, ownership and access decisions often remain with individual users. That is workable in small teams, but it gets risky when staff changes, when vendors come and go, or when you need consistent retention across departments.

Shared Drives are the better match for controlled collaboration. They allow the organization to own the data rather than the individual. Done well, Shared Drives support clean separation between departments (billing, HR, clinical operations), and offboarding is simpler because files are not “stuck” to a departed user.

Google’s biggest day-to-day risk tends to be social engineering rather than a failure of encryption. Users receive a convincing shared link, grant access, or authorize a malicious OAuth app. Strong identity policies and user training matter more than debating AES variants.

The security controls that decide outcomes (regardless of platform)

Many organizations ask “Which is more secure?” when the better question is “Which will we run securely next month?”

A practical set of decision questions to bring to your selection process:

• Identity enforcement: Can we require MFA for every user, and stronger methods for admins?
• Device requirements: Can we block sync and downloads on unmanaged devices?
• External sharing: Can we restrict sharing to approved domains and stop anonymous links?
• Visibility: Do we have audit logs retained long enough to investigate an incident?
• Response: If a user account is compromised, can we quickly contain access and rotate sessions?

If you cannot answer those questions with confidence, the platform choice will not save you.

Common misconfigurations that create avoidable exposure

Most file-sharing incidents we see are not “zero-day” events. They are settings and habits that never got revisited after rollout.

Here are patterns that repeatedly show up during assessments:

• Link sharing left open: “Anyone with the link can view” becomes the default and spreads outside the business.
• Over-permissioned groups: One big “All Staff” group gets edit rights to sensitive libraries or drives.
• No device guardrails: Users sync regulated data to personal laptops without disk encryption or endpoint protection.
• Stale guest access: Vendors keep access long after a project ends.
• Admin sprawl: Too many super admins or global admins, with weak MFA methods.

Fixing these is usually more about policy and ownership than technology.

Healthcare and EMR workflows: what Sacramento-area clinics should prioritize

Healthcare organizations often store more than “files.” They store referrals, exports, scanned records, lab reports, and payer documents that can contain ePHI. Whether those originate in the EMR or move through email and shared folders, the file system becomes part of your HIPAA risk picture.

A few practical priorities tend to matter most:

Limit where ePHI can live. Decide whether collaboration happens in a controlled SharePoint site or a controlled Shared Drive, then block ad hoc alternatives.

Require strong sign-in. MFA should be mandatory for all users, and phishing-resistant methods (security keys or authenticator-based number matching) should be considered for admins and anyone with broad access.

Control endpoints. If staff use shared workstations or take-home devices, you need a clear stance on managed devices, encryption, and what data can be cached offline.

Get serious about auditability. If you cannot reconstruct who accessed or shared a sensitive file, you are betting the business on luck.

Business associate agreements and compliance documentation can be supported by both Microsoft and Google ecosystems, but your configuration, retention, and access policies are what determine whether the environment stands up to an audit or a breach review.

A practical selection guide (security-first, operations-aware)

If your organization is already standardized on Microsoft 365 apps, using OneDrive plus SharePoint often reduces identity sprawl and simplifies policy enforcement through a single control plane. If your organization is standardized on Google Workspace, Drive can be operated securely, especially when Shared Drives are the default for team content and link sharing is tightly governed.

A simple way to think about fit:

• Teams with heavy Microsoft Teams usage often do best when SharePoint sites are the backbone for shared files.
• Teams with rapid external collaboration and simple workflows often do well on Google Workspace, provided Shared Drives and trust rules are used consistently.
• Regulated organizations should weight identity controls, logging retention, device management, and DLP maturity above user preference.

Security also ties back to support. A platform that your team does not know how to govern will drift toward risky settings.

How Business PC Support approaches secure cloud file systems

Business PC Support works with Sacramento-area organizations to design and operate cloud file systems with a security and compliance lens, including healthcare environments and teams selecting or integrating EMR-related workflows. The goal is not just “move files to the cloud,” but to reduce exposure while keeping staff productive.

That usually means:

• Selecting the right storage model (SharePoint sites vs OneDrive vs Shared Drives) based on ownership and retention needs
• Setting MFA, conditional access or context-aware access, and admin role separation
• Establishing external sharing rules that match real partner relationships
• Turning on audit logging, alerting, and ongoing monitoring through a SOC-driven approach
• Validating endpoint protections so sync does not become a data leak path

If you are deciding between these platforms, the most useful next step is often a short discovery focused on who shares what with whom, from which devices, and what compliance obligations apply. That provides the blueprint for a defensible configuration, no matter which logo ends up on the login page.