Google really wants to keep its Google Drive cloud storage service safe, as it will be investing $1 million to fund security research grants for independent research on Drive's vulnerability for 2016.
In addition to the $1 million in grants, Google will continue offering as much as $20,000 to anybody who can find and report a legitimate security issue in Google Drive.
"The end result of these ongoing efforts is a product that — unlike your garden-variety hard drive — actually gets better over time," wrote Google Drive's product manager Kevin Nelson in a blog post announcing the investment.
For those unfamiliar with the research grant program of Google, it was designed and established to fund independent security research teams for contributions to helping ensure that Google Drive remains safe. While Google said that keeping files on Google Drive safe is done so using very secure and custom-built data centers, people still play a significant part, specifically the software engineers and over 500 security experts working for Google, and a community of independent data security researchers.
The announcement of the $1 million investment for next year and the continuation of the $20,000 reward shows how serious Google is in keeping the files on Google Drive safe.
Nelson also wrote on the blog post that with the holiday season, many people would be buying or receiving new mobile devices or computers, and so would possibly have to deal with transferring bulk amounts of important files coming from the older devices into the newer ones. Google Drive, available for PC, Mac, iOS and Android, would be able to make it easier for users to move all the files while maintaining security.
In addition to keeping files secure, Google has been making steady improvements to the cloud storage service. Last week, Google released an update to Google Drive that made the service's search feature for the iOS, Android and Web versions perform better than ever. Included in the update is the implementation of 3D Touch features for Google Drive users on the iPhone 6s, searching through Google Drive using iOS search, easier access to advanced search and the ability to search in terms of file types.
