Many companies find converting freemium users to premium users an endless maze, but Google just saw wild success by hitting the 1 million mark in paid subscriptions for Google Drive.

The cloud service offers 15 GB of free storage spread across Drive, Gmail and Photos. Beyond that, the succeeding option is a 100 GB storage worth $1.99 per month. Businesses and organizations are the primary patrons of the premium option.

But Google is not resting on its laurels. To nurture the growing count of paid users, Google Drive is tightening its privacy and security features.

These features were introduced on Sept. 21 to provide organizations more visibility and control over business files stored and shared on Google Drive by employees. The new functions add legal hold and retention capabilities to the existing collection of e-discovery capabilities available with the cloud storage service.

Data retention allows premium subscribers to set default expiration commands for stored content following a specific period. The legal hold function ensures that specific content is secured and available for legal purposes even if employees delete the data from Google Drive.

The additions were developed to help business fulfill their legal obligations pertaining to data archiving and removal.

Google is rolling the advancements this week.

Google also announced that Google Drive has earned the ISO 270018 certification standard for cloud privacy. The achievement validates that the company does not use customer data for advertising purposes. Information entrusted to the company is shielded from the government and other third parties. Google also provides customers with tools to delete or export their data from Google Drive and has always been transparent on where the data is stored. 

Prior to the ISO certification, Google Drive has been certified as compliant with the SOC 2 and SOC 3 security standards for cloud computing.