What is Google Drive for?
Everyday document creation, collaboration and storage tied closely to Google Workspace and shared across teams.
Google Drive and Citadel do different jobs.
Google Drive stores your working files. Citadel stores the files you cannot afford to lose.
What is Citadel for?
Protecting and archiving high-value information: board papers, IP, legal files, financial records, source code and private keys. It is a vault, not a workspace.
Do you need both?
Usually, yes. Most organisations keep Google Drive for everyday work and move their crown-jewel data into Citadel, where there is no sharing surface at all.
Every Citadel subscription protects more than storage.
Citadel is priced for the people who use it and the work they do. The service connects identity, networking, transport, protected data, recovery and business continuity in one architecture.
Identity
Quantum-Secure® authentication designed to reduce dependence on traditional key-based access.
Network
Quantum-Secure® private networking extends protection beyond the storage environment.
Transport
ParticleMesh™ protects data as it moves between people, applications, clouds and infrastructure.
Data
Secured2 protection is applied to the data itself, beyond conventional encryption at rest.
Resilience
Multi-location redundancy, recovery and business continuity reduce dependence on any single system.
Risk
Eligible deployments can include contractual cyber-risk indemnification backed by a Lloyd's of London insurance policy.*
* Insurance, indemnification, coverage limits, exclusions, eligibility and availability are subject to the applicable policy and contractual terms.
An honest comparison.
Google Drive is a capable product and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It is designed for productivity, and it is good at it.
Citadel is designed for containment. It has no sharing, no links, no guests and no sync client, because every one of those is a route out. Those absences would be flaws in a collaboration tool. In a vault they are the point.
Where the protection differs.
Mainstream platforms protect data with encryption and access controls: an algorithm, a key and a permission model. That is a reasonable design, and it rests on the key staying secret.
Citadel adds Secured2's physics-based Quantum-Secure® protection. Files are reduced, separated into fragments with no independent meaning, and distributed, so no single location holds a complete, readable file.
Google Drive and Citadel side by side
| How they compare | |
|---|---|
| Primary purpose | Drive: collaborative work. Citadel: protected archive. |
| Sharing | Drive: link sharing and broad permissions. Citadel: none. |
| Account exposure | Drive: a compromised account reaches the files it can see. Citadel: separate identity boundary and private code. |
| Data protection model | Drive: encryption with provider-managed keys. Citadel: physics-based Quantum-Secure® protection. |
| Best used for | Drive: documents being written. Citadel: documents being protected. |
Questions people ask
- Should confidential files live in Google Drive?
- Working drafts, often yes. Finalised crown-jewel material is better held somewhere with no sharing surface.
- Does Citadel integrate with Workspace?
- No. Integrations are additional routes into the vault, which is what Citadel avoids.
- Can I sign in with Google?
- Yes, and we recommend adding a private code as your second step.
Keep reading
Keep working where you work. Vault what you cannot lose.
Citadel sits alongside the tools your teams already use, and takes responsibility for the files that must never leak.