Google G Suite

Being able to tightly control access to your communications is an enormous security advantage. So with archiving and set retention policies, that allow you to control how long your email messages and chats are retained, you’re limiting the access that any unauthorised parties have to your information. You also have the choice to specify policies for your entire domain or policies strictly based on organisational units, date ranges, or specific terms.

Within the security centre itself, G Suite gives you an overarching, comprehensive view of your current security status, with analytics and insights into ways you can improve. You can also use the Vault function to track user activity and give you insights into searches, message views, exports and more; all excellent ways to monitor your security from within.

Google is very clever when it comes to protecting sensitive data. You can easily prevent leakage of sensitive data like credit card numbers via emails. G Suite allows you to set up policy-based actions to notify your admin, add warnings to the user or entirely block emails from being sent when sensitive content has been detected. You can also prevent unauthorised sharing of files containing sensitive information, when they’re stored in your G Drive. You can use over 50 detectors for sensitive content matching, as well as create your own custom rules to add warnings or prevent sharing.

If that’s not enough security for you, but wait there’s more. G Suite enables you to add extra security to your email communications using S/MIME signatures. S/MIME, or Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions is a standard method for sending digitally signed and encrypted email messages. You can easily add these signatures to all outbound emails to make them more secure. Admins can also require security key usage to log in to G Suite, preventing other less secure methods of access.

The app maker allows you to build apps faster, by employing a drag-and-drop interface and has what they call ‘declarative data modeling’ which seems to be a technical way of saying you can create your own data models or forms, where you can choose your own data fields, and display it in an arrangement relevant to you. This system of app creation means anyone can build an app for your business, not just your programmers.

App Maker really caters for basic levels of knowledge in a way that many other systems do not. To get you started, you can use one of their pre-made templates for something like project tracking, or people directories, though there are many to choose from. Google also has several tutorials you can follow to create specific apps that serve your business here [https://developers.google.com/appmaker/tutorials/]. Furthermore, you can use HTML and CSS to customise and control the way your apps look to ensure they fit your brand!

Your app won’t just exist in a vacuum either, isolated from the rest of your system. Using Google App Scripts, you can connect your app to the Google Cloud Platform and other services to gain insights, drive action and empower your business app. Scripts can enable your app to extract relevant data from other third-party services, for example email addresses from Mailchimp, and pull them into your app for your data model.

Through this entire process, all G Suite administrators can retain control and monitor what’s going on. They maintain full visibility over what apps are running within the organisation, including information about owners, usage metrics and OAuth permissions (access authorisation).

This search engine will consider all sources within your company when performing a search. Normally, you select a folder or directory and perform your search within there, but Cloud Search performs a global search through all your sources starting with Gmail, Drive, and moving up to Calendar, and other apps available. If you can’t remember the file name, but know it’s related to a specific client, you can just search for that client’s name or business. Within seconds, Google’s Cloud Search will display documents, emails or appointments you had with the said client. It will even search for your key phrase within the body text of files to find what you need.

Cloud Search will only return results that fall within the range that user has permission to access, so there’s no loophole here that allows users to find information they are restricted from. Your users can, however, search your company directory for fellow colleagues, and at a glance see their details, as well as what events and files they have in common. This makes it quick to grab someone’s contact details to send an email, make a call or start a Hangout chat with just one click.

With the Cloud Search app on your mobile, you have your personal organiser at hand to provide you with timely reminders and assistance to keep you organised each day. Google intelligence keeps you abreast of upcoming meetings, deadlines, and projects so you don’t get overwhelmed trying to keep track of everything yourself. Each ‘card’ will display relevant information to that reminder, any emails pertaining to a specific meeting for example, or documents related to a project. Remember, this is an app that can learn from your behaviour, so the more you use it, the better suited it will be to your company and how you run your business.

Vault comes standard with the Business and Enterprise plans, but can easily be purchased as an add-on to the Basic plan, if that’s the way you’re going. You are set up with a single archive for email with central information storage and centralised data management. You set and manage your email and chat retention policies, allowing you to preserve all on-the-record messages. At the end of the retention period, Google Vault automates compliance with retention policies. You can set policies to apply to the whole domain, or just specific areas with date ranges or specific query terms. Vault allows you to track and keep all logged data for any potential legal audits!

Vault allows you to find and retrieve any valuable information you need, even if the account in question has been suspended. This prevents any data loss from employee turnover, and amazingly, you can even export past versions of Google Drive files. And given how much you’re trusting with Google Vault, it should comfort you to know that Google Vault has successfully completed an SSAE 16 / ISAE 3402 SOC 2 Type II audit. Performed by Ernst & Young, this audit verifies a standard set of controls for security, availability, processing integrity and confidentiality of the data that is stored in Vault.