- Every now and again
we get some phonies
who wanna have a little bit
of a go at Google.
And they say, well, hey,
if Google have access
to all my data
then doesn't that mean
that they own my data.
And they pull up
some weird obscure line
in the Google user agreement.
And they say,
Google is owning your data.
Google is an evil company,
blah, blah, blah.
The reality is the Google
does not give a shit
about your data,
just to be completely honest.
All Google cares about
is the aggregate behaviors.
And this might be scarier for you
but the aggregate behaviors
of millions of people
and they use that data
to improve their products.
Now, your business products
that you have with Google
if you're a subscriber
to Google Workspace
are not used for advertising.
I'm just gonna clarify that.
Your data and your behaviors
inside Google's business tools
are not used to advertise to you.
If you use the free edition of Gmail
which is a consumer product,
which you don't pay for
they do advertise to you
in that product.
But there's a misconception
that Google's business tools
either own your data
or were used for advertising.
And that's completely false.
So it's completely okay
as long as you're okay
with Google as a company
and that's a different story,
but it's completely okay
to trust someone like Google
and therefore trust the Cloud
with your data.
So the next part
of the conversation
is then, well, why?
Why would we use Cloud storage?
And I wanna go a little bit deeper
into the why
and why this is so important.
Now, most of us probably
have a few files lying around
on an old hard Drive
or maybe they're sitting
on our desktop computer.
And for many of us
our desktop looks
something like this,
not me, I'm a complete neat freak,
but I absolutely understand.
And so for those that have data,
a little bit of data
kind of floating around
or maybe you've got some data
sitting on a contractor's computer,
or maybe you've got
some data sitting
on your virtual assistant's computer,
if you've got
an international team member
helping you out in the business.
Now, what can happen is that
businesses can lose data
when you have what what?
what the industry call
a data loss event, right?
And that's basically
something going wrong,
you lose data.
Now, most businesses do not recover
from a large data loss event.
And I'm talking about
if you lost a year's worth of data
or a couple of years worth of data.
Most businesses do not recover from that.
There is cyber insurance
and there's ways
of protecting yourself
financially from that.
But the actual business quite often
does not actually survive.
And my story around data loss
is that I am a avid collector of music.
I'm a pretty big music fan.
And when I was a teenager,
I spent years and years
and years collecting music.
Now, at the time
I was downloading illegally,
don't shoot me for that.
But what I had was
this massive library
of I think about 50
or 60 gigabytes of music
all neatly organized
on my computer.
And unfortunately,
I only had it stored
on a single hard Drive.
And you all know where this is going.
It was a single, external hard Drive.
And something happened to the Drive.
I dropped it
or I raised over it
or something happened
and the data was toast.
And I basically lost
all of that data.
Now, my mistake was
I only had the data in one place
and data is not safe unless
it's in at least two
geographically dispersed locations, right?
So data is not safe unless it's
in at least two
geographically displaced locations.
Now, you might say, okay, Pete,
well, I've got data
sitting on a backup USB hard Drive.
And I send that
to my mum's place, right?
And if it's only existing
in that one place,
that data is not actually safe.
I think we've all got to the point
where now we know that
USB sticks can be dropped,
hard Drives can get corrupted
even if you burnt something to a CD,
I don't think people do that anymore.
They actually have a lifespan
where they will deteriorate.
Physical media will deteriorate
but what's more likely to happen
is something like this,
a ransomware attack.
What's most likely to happen
if you're working
on a local computer or windows
or a Mac machine,
Chromebooks are thankfully immune to this
but if you're on a windows
or a Mac machine,
from time to time
around comes a CryptoLocker virus
and these are still out there
and all over the place.
And this is called ransomware
because someone asks you
a ransom to pay for you
to be able to unlock your data.
Now, we had a client of ours
who were a law firm
and had 30 employees
and they had all
of their data sitting
on their server, right?
And they thought they were safe.
Now, they had a backup connected
to the server as well.
They thought they were safe,
but unfortunately
because they had not
backed the data up
to another geographical location,
the ransomware infected the service system.
infected all of the desktops,
infected the backups.
And they were down
for literally weeks
while it was recovered.
Now, they had to pay
thousands of dollars in ransom.
You know, obviously
that was a small price to pay
compared to the actual business loss
that they had.
But we had offered to that customer
a Cloud backup
for their Google workspace.
They had opted not to take that.
And unfortunately,
they didn't get access,
they lost access to the data
for a number of weeks.
We were able to get 99%
of the data back for them
which was very lucky,
but not before it stopped
their business for a number of weeks.
Literally, in its tracks,
staff went home
and sat at home doing nothing
because they just didn't
have anything else to do.
And so we'll cover it back up
a little bit later
when I cover more about Google Drive.
But don't think just because
you've got Dropbox
or just because
you've got Google Drive
that you're completely safe
from a ransomware
or a CryptoLocker attack.
What can happen is
when your files are infected
on your computer,
it then synchronizes the infected files
to either Dropbox
or Google Drive.
And so you need to do
what's called a
point in time restore on those.
And that actually takes time
and considerable effort
to get that to happen.
But it's an absolute no-no to be running
without a backup online of your files.
So previously,
when I was using just local storage
and a long time ago,
I was using Outlook.
I ran into the problem where Outlook
after a number of years
starts to run slowly.
And I wanted to share with you
a couple of tricks in Gmail
for any of those
who may be in our audience
who are still using Outlook.
I want to share with you a couple
of tricks that you can do
inside of Gmail
which just completely
blow the Microsoft system
out of the water.
Now, in general,
using Cloud-based tools
and Cloud-based technologies
and using a browser-based tool
is gonna be a bit
like driving that Tesla.
It's much simpler.
There's less things
that can go wrong.
And what it actually means is that
because it's running
in the browser,
you're always running
the latest version.
Now, with something
like Microsoft Outlook.
you've got to wait
for the latest version
to download from time to time
and there's upgrades
and there's maintenance.
And if something goes wrong,
you got to uninstall it
and re-install it.
And all those kinds of things
exist with Microsoft
because it's an app
that you install
on your computer
rather than a website,
which is available 24/7
for millions and millions of people.
Now, when I'm inside my Gmail
I have access to every single one
of my emails going back
basically to the start of time
when I started the business
about 12 years ago,
nearly 500,000 emails.
And the total storage
in my mailbox is about 50 gigabytes.
Now, inside my mailbox
here in my Gmail,
I can actually search for an email
way back to let's say,
let's go back to emails from 2011
and bang,
it's immediately, immediately
going to show me those emails
and pop up here with my search request.
And so anytime I need
to search for an email,
it doesn't matter how back,
how far back I need to go,
it's instantly opening up
all of my emails.
And you just can't do that with Outlook
because you've got an auto archive
and the PST files get too big.
And the index on the search
starts slowing down.
The other thing that
I really love about Google
is there is an amazing
advanced search as well.
So if I wanna look for an email,
maybe to or from Angel,
I'll put an Angel's name here.
Maybe the subject was Cebu conference.
I know we had a conference
a number of years ago in Cebu.
And from there,
let's say it includes the word invoice.
So I'm just throwing
some random bits
and pieces here.
Oh no, I don't think
there was anything to do
with an invoice there.
Okay, let's try again.
Oh no, I think Angel
was employed after
our Cebu conference.
There we go.
All right, let's try it invoice again.
And that's gonna bring it up.
Now, you can see here that
out of the 500,000 emails
in my inbox,
four emails between Angel and myself
include the word invoice.
And so this is something
called search stacking,
where we all use google.com
and we all know a few tricks
with google.com, right?
You can put quotation marks
around what you're trying
to search for,
and that will help you find
an exact string.
Inside of Gmail,
you have a search
that is just as powerful
as Google's full web search
and allows you to find
anything you need inside your emails.
Now, are you ready
for me to fry your noodle?
Let me fry your noodle here.
If the search is this powerful,
why would you ever bother using folders?
There's just no use
to bother using folders
if you can always find exactly
what you need by searching.
And so storing
all of your files online
not only will it keep you safe
from losing your computer
breaking a computer,
CryptoLocker, viruses,
all kinds of things
that can go wrong.
Not only does it help
with the productivity
of your team
but using Cloud-based email
like Gmail might just save you
20 or 30 minutes a day
that you spend right now either filing
or having trouble finding information.
And many people are just
in complete inbox overwhelm.
I get that.
Not everyone's even got the time
to file anymore.
Most of us just like
kind of leave it
in complete application.
That's totally fine.
I understand that.
But what we have with Google
is the ability to find
and retrieve information
in a simple way.
And that makes our life a lot easier.
(upbeat music)