Govt bans use of Google Drive, Dropbox and VPN services, here’s why

New Delhi: The government and virtual private network (VPN) service providers are now at loggerheads over the country's cybersecurity requirements. The government has issued a new order prohibiting its employees from using third-party VPNs.

According to a report, the government has prohibited its employees from using third-party VPN services such as ExpressVPN, NordVPN, and others.

This comes after firms such as ExpressVPN, Surfshark, and NordVPN indicated that they would be pulling their servers out of India as a result of the government's new cybersecurity directives, which will take effect on June 27.

The government recently called VPN providers and other stakeholders to a meeting to review the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team's guidelines (Cert-In).

Apart from prohibiting government personnel from utilising VPN services, the directive also advises them not to save any internal, restricted, or confidential government data on non-government cloud services like Google Drive or Dropbox.

The National Informatics Centre (NIC), which is part of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, is said to have published the recommendations (MeitY).

"These guidelines have been created in order to sensitise government personnel and contractual/outsourced resources and build awareness amongst them on what to do and what not to do from a cyber security standpoint," according to the NIC document.

Employees are also advised not to "root" or "jailbreak" their handsets, according to the letter. Employees have also been told not to use CamScanner to scan official papers. CamScanner, along with other Chinese apps, was prohibited by the government in June 2020.

"The government's security posture can be strengthened by following common cyber security principles in government offices across the country," the directive continued.