This week, I want to talk about risk versus cost.
And my question to you is,
would you drive your car without insurance?
So, this week, I want to talk about the difference
between a Gmail account and a G Suite for Business account.
And more specifically, storing your data
or the risk of storing your corporate data
in a Google consumer or Gmail account.
We often come across customers who have set up
Gmail or consumer Google accounts
to store their business data,
whether that's email or documents.
Primarily documents, because that tends to be around
usage of the Google Drive solution.
It tends to be kind of two different scenarios.
So the first one is a small business
who has set up a Gmail account,
primarily as a way to share information within Google Drive.
So they've uploaded all of their corporate data into it,
and they're using it to share with suppliers
and customers and internally within their own teams.
And then they maybe have it syncing down
onto to their computers.
So that's the first scenario.
The second tends to be larger companies
with maybe 50 employees, 100 employees, or 1,000 employees
and, either with or without the IT team's permission,
or the business's knowledge,
a team or department has gone
and set up Google accounts using their domain,
but they're still consumer
or sort of the same as a Gmail account.
What this means is that, again, for this scenario,
the corporate data is being stored
within these personal accounts.
So what I want to do is go through what I feel
are the four core reasons why you should
use a G Suite Business account
over a Gmail or Google account.
Or certainly what the risks are of using
that consumer Google account.
So the first one has to be a contract.
There's no contract or service level agreement
in place when you have or use a Google consumer account.
With the G Suite Business account, you get
a service level agreement with Google which guarantees
up time in terms of the product.
It also gives you a contract around the actual data
that you're placing in there,
and gives requirements on both yourself and Google,
of what happens with that data,
who owns that data, and who can control that data.
What happens when you leave the product
and whether you can take the data with you easily.
With a consumer account, again,
you're just signing the terms and conditions,
there's no SLA in place,
whereas with the G Suite Business account
you're getting that contract.
And with that, which is my second one,
you're also getting enterprise level support.
With a Google consumer account, no support contract there.
And now, I'm going to get into some examples
but I just want to run through these quickly.
The next area, and where the other two come from,
is within that sort of security and control piece.
So, there's no administration within
a Google consumer account.
As an owner or as an IT administrator,
you have no administrative control or backend.
Which means, you have no overview or control
over the accounts that your team are using.
If someone leaves the organisation,
you can't change the password,
you can't suspend the account,
you can't gain control over that account
unless they give you the username and password.
And from a security point of view,
you can't ensure the security on those accounts.
So, you can't actually say
I want a particular level of password.
I want to enforce two-step verification.
And you've no way of validating whether
that's been done if you ask people to do it.
So there's no overview, and no real security
from that point of view.
And then again, as I said, there's no contract.
And all of those things add up to really
not being a compliant way to hold your data,
both in terms of rules like GDPR compliance,
but also your own governance and compliance
as an organisation or business.
There is no way for you to guarantee the integrity
and security of the data that you're placing
within those consumer accounts.
So what I'd like to do is just go through
a couple of scenarios that might happen to you
if you were to use a consumer account,
and not just Google, any consumer account really,
to hold your business critical data.
So, the first one is what happens
when an employee leaves the organisation.
So whether you're a small business with, you know,
a dozen employees or you're a large corporation
and you've got people using, say, a consumer Google account,
when the person leaves,
if they don't give you the username and password,
all the data within that account you've lost access to.
You've no way to reset the password
and gain access to it again.
You're asking that employee
to give you the details of that account.
There's no administrative control.
So, from your perspective now, that information is now gone.
And you've maybe got to take legal recourse
to try and get it back,
which again as we said, there's no contract,
it's technically a consumer account,
it's actually technically their account
because they set it up usually.
And so the business doesn't actually own the account.
They don't even own the data within it, technically.
And so there's a whole legal grey area there
that's very, very difficult to kind of manoeuvre through.
The next one is account lockout.
So, if you were just to get locked out of the account.
So, nothing malicious.
An employee has forgotten the password,
and they maybe haven't set up a backup email address,
they're now locked out of the account.
Again, there's no SLA with Google,
there's no support, enterprise level support,
so you have no one to ask
to be able to get back into the account.
You don't have admin control,
so you can't just reset the password.
So again, you've lost access to that data
and that information, potentially indefinitely.
The next one is hacking.
So if your account was to get hacked or compromised,
again, Google could just shut off access to the account.
That's happened for many people whose
accounts have been compromised, and again,
they've sometimes, it's been a long time
before they've gotten access to it
or they've actually been unable to.
With G Suite account, you've got security features
built in that will detect things like suspicious logins.
From an administrator point of view,
admins will be able to suspend accounts
in order to gain back access.
So again, that security and control
that is just vital for businesses
to keep access to their data.
And then the last one I had was just
an employee maliciously deleting data.
People always say it's never going to happen to them,
but you know, you don't necessarily know that.
And if someone wanted to either take data with them,
or maliciously go and delete
all of the data within the account,
again you've got no recourse or backup
or ability to recover that data
because all of your admin and controls
that you would have with a G Suite account aren't there.
So, that's just four particular areas
that I think are important when kind of evaluating this,
and four particular scenarios.
I think that really for me,
it's a cost versus risk scenario.
You know, the insurance example I have
of would you drive without insurance,
most people wouldn't because the risk
is too great versus the cost.
We don't like the cost of insurance.
It's fairly expensive, particularly in Ireland,
but the risk of driving without it is too great.
Of getting stopped by the police
or having an accident and having
to make this huge payout.
And I think for businesses,
if they were to really consider the cost of their data,
could they function on an ongoing basis,
on a day-to-day basis without the data that they have.
And by data, I mean the files
and the presentations and the invoices,
and all that information to do with your business.
Or what would happen if that information
got out into the web
and all of your private corporate data was,
you know, made public in some way.
You know, not having the security and control
over that data is really, really important.
An interesting one I didn't mention,
things like shared drives or team drives,
we've a separate video on that,
but that's an example of the type of control
you would have within a G Suite account,
where you can set up a shared drive,
someone leaves the organisation
or a supplier you stopped working with them,
you remove their account and automatically
they're removed from all of the files
and folders within that account.
You don't have that shared drives, team drives,
solution doesn't exist within Gmail.
So just another example of the lack of security
and control that you have over your data.
For all of our customers we recommend at least
G Suite Business because it has the team drives
or shared drives feature,
and we just feel that in order to be GDPR compliant
and in order to have a secure system,
you have to at least be using G Suite Business.
So that's it from me.
I hope you enjoyed this week's short update.
I'd be interested to know what you feel about
using consumer accounts versus business accounts.
I know some people use consumer Dropbox accounts
versus, again, Dropbox for Business
or the Google example that I have.
There's lots of different examples out there.
You know, OneDrive as well within the Microsoft world.
What do people feel about using consumer accounts
versus using business accounts?
Is it worth the risk for you as a business
to kind of cheap out and not have to pay
this monthly or annual fee
and take the risk of driving with no insurance.
Chat to you guys next week.