If you're a business owner or IT executive in the healthcare,
legal or finance industries, well, it's a good idea for you
to listen up for this. If you're using Google workspace and have
not yet considered switching to Google Enterprise, this video is
going to cover all the reasons why you might want to consider
making the switch.
Now, I need to preface any advice in this video, that I'm
not a lawyer. And it's important for you to check the regulatory
requirements in the country of your residence at the moment,
and make sure that anything I share here is applied to your
particular locale. Now, I'm going to give examples from
Australia and using Australian law and the basics that I know
but I can't give any advice here. This is just general
information about the products and about my experience in
business. So make sure you check this off with your lawyer or
anyone else that you usually go to to get advice on these
issues. Now, for many businesses that are using Google workspace
and want to work in a more efficient, more productive, more
effective way of working, businesses will often switch to
Google workspace. And we have worked with literally 1000s of
businesses all over the world, helping them get their
technology, right so that teams can be productive. Now, from
time to time, we come across a business in particular
industries, they're either a healthcare provider, they're
working in finance, or perhaps a legal or consulting firm. And
these businesses have an extra layer of regulation that other
small and medium sized businesses would not normally
have. Now in Australia, we have something called Australian
Privacy Principles, which is an extension of our Privacy Act.
And it effectively regulates the way that the personal
information of your consumers is actually handled inside your
business. And there's a stringent set of guidelines to
ensure that the personal information of those that you
work with is well protected. Now, imagine you're a financial
advisor, and you have somebody sending you their bank
statements, or their taxation information, or their credit
card details, or even their date of birth. In Australia, it's
actually called a tax file number, but other countries call
it social security. And so you have that information being
handled inside a business. If you're a lawyer, you may have
sensitive details about particular cases, again,
personal information, date of birth, you know, perhaps
concealed information that will usually only be shown in a
court. And if you're in the healthcare space, well, you've
got somebody's most intimate information in that healthcare
records. Now, all of these pieces of information need to be
stored and protected properly, which is why there are privacy
laws in each country. And many businesses, even small
businesses. And you know, I'd say an example might be like a
psychology practice that has, you know, has a hold of this
information. You know, even if you're a small business, some,
some businesses don't actually go to the trouble of protecting
things. If you're a small law firm, if you're a small
accounting firm, if you're a small financial advisory,
perhaps you're in the earliest stages of business, you've got
less than 10 employees, you know, but quite often, not all
the boxes are ticked in terms of making sure that privacy is
taken care of. Now, in Australia, any business with
more than $2 million, a year of revenue actually needs to comply
with the Australian Privacy Principles.
So any business that is growing into the mid market space,
starting to hire more and more employees go to a bigger
business actually needs to adhere to these rules. And the
penalties for not getting these right mean that you might
actually end up potentially fined or even in prison. Yes,
they are that serious, if there are major breaches of the
privacy principles and privacy laws. So it's really important
to make sure that you have strict privacy controls on the
personal information of your customers and consumers that
you're handling. If you were to not take care of this and not
take it seriously, it's a little bit like driving down the
highway without a seatbelt on. For the most part, you're
probably going to be okay, but the one day that you have an
accident, well, you're going to run into a lot of trouble. So
let's start sharing some of the principles and why it's
important for you to make sure that you have good privacy
controls on your data, and how something like G Suite
Enterprise can actually help with that. Now, the Australian
Privacy Principles outline the ways that you should protect
data. And if you think about, you know, what are the most
common ways that data is shared inside a business? Well,
unfortunately, some team members may share customer information
on chat is potentially shared in, you know, plain text
information just sitting in documents, your team may be on,
you know, email and sending emails between each other with
customer information, or maybe forwarding a customer email to
another colleague, which may include customer information on
there. And so you can see, it's obviously it's pretty easy for
leaks to start to happen. If you imagine a staff member who's you
know, catching the bus home or train, and they don't have a
passcode on their phone, and they accidentally leave that on
their on their mode of transport, then someone could
actually jump straight into their work, email and
potentially see customer information. And that is a clear
breach of the privacy principles because you need to make sure
that you've made a solid effort to actually protect the
information of your customers and of your consumers. So what
are some of the things that you need to make sure you have in
place for this protection? Well, number one is making sure that
you have secured the endpoints. I just talked about mobile
phones and you know Typically leaving a laptop or a phone or a
device or an iPad, on a train or on a bus, you want to make sure
that those endpoints are secured. And what that means is
enforcing a policy of having passcodes on individual devices
so that no one can just leave their phone without a passcode.
And, of course, if you've got 30, or 40, staff, it's going to
be hard to run around to every single person and check whether
or not they actually have a passcode set up on their phone.
And so that's why we set a policy inside of Google
workspace, which is automatically applied, the first
time that they sign into their work account. Next up is to make
sure that you have a disaster recovery plan. And that is,
what's your recovery plan. If something goes wrong with your
data inside your organization, if you have some kind of data
loss event, are you prepared for that? Now, for most businesses,
when they're using the cloud, they just kind of trust that
it's always gonna be there. And you're pretty safe to do that.
In all honesty, it's very unlikely that using even Dropbox
or Microsoft, of course, Google workspace and google drive to
store your data, it's so unlikely that there's going to
be any data loss event that might happen there, which is on
account or you know, the fault of Google. But what's more
likely to happen is something that involves human
intervention. Maybe you have a rogue employee who's left the
business and has decided to delete some things on the way
out, or someone is cleaning up their files in their Google
Drive. And by accident, they delete the wrong folder. And
then 30 days later, it's gone from trash, and they have a bit
of an Oopsy daisy moment that that data has now gone missing.
Now that can run serious, serious, serious problems into a
business such as a legal or consulting business, or
accounting or finance business where you have to keep records
for a certain amount of time. Imagine losing someone's
personal information in a healthcare, business or
potentially losing medical records. So ensuring that you
have a disaster recovery plan means that you have copies of
your data outside the application that you're using,
are using something like a third party backup service for Google
workspace is something to handle this, we have options available
for that, if you're an existing workspace subscriber Australian
Privacy Principles covers all business data, it doesn't just
cover your customers personal information, which means that
any app that you're using any service that you're using, is
important that you have all of the data secured, and safe and
protected from anyone getting their hands on it, but also
protected from staff leaking that information accidentally,
either internally, or externally as well. So you want to make
sure you have like the right correct permissions set up for
your Google Drive very, very basic things. But making sure
only the right team members can see certain folders or see
certain client information. The other thing to be mindful of is
if you're using third party applications, like maybe slack,
and that has a limit on the amount of service that is stored
in there and the amount of history that is stored. Well,
you may consider not paying for that, as most small businesses
want to keep their expenses down. But you actually lose
access to some of your data by using an application like that
in
free mode. And so when many businesses choose to use
multiple different apps, our recommendation is to actually
consolidate and simplify. And so if you're interested in learning
about why using Slack is probably not a great idea for
business, you can jump on to our video and choose to instead use
Google chat over slack. Next up, one of the principles of the
Australian laws around privacy is the mandatory reporting of
breaches, which means that if you detect a breach inside your
business, you actually have to report those breaches. And in
those cases, it's very important that you have a full log of
everything that's happened in business, no one wants to get to
a stage where you have an incident or a claim or a legal
case. And you've got to try and trawl through your data and
actually find out what happened, particularly if there is data
missing, because that's the kind of thing that can land you in
hot water with the law if you've mishandled somebody's personal
information. And one of the great features of G Suite
Enterprise is being able to use the Google Vault and vault
allows you to store all of your information safely and securely.
Any email that comes into your business or goes out of the
business, and even documents and files has a carbon copy stored
inside Google Vault. And that carbon copy means that anytime
there is a communication, you've got a safe copy of it, even if
someone deletes it from the individual mailbox. So what are
some of the features of workspace enterprise, which
allow you to tackle and manage these different areas of
business while securing endpoints I already shared that
you can set a policy for everyone to ensure that there
are the correct levels of passcodes and authentication on
each device that accesses your business data, which will help
you to ensure that they are protected. Next, having a third
party backup application service for a disaster recovery plan is
going to ensure that your data is covered something like data
loss prevention, and what that actually means is there will be
a process where anytime one of your team members puts a plain
text piece of critical information into an email that
email will actually be automatically quarantined by
security rules. And this is a great feature just for
enterprise accounts which means that anytime someone accident He
puts personal information in an email, it can't actually leave
the business, even if your staff were to make the mistake.
There's many more features of workspace enterprise, which make
this setup for your business and absolute sense. And if you're
interested in getting some help with that, then you can check
out the links below. At the end of the day, whether it was
malicious damage by your staff who shared information on
purpose or willingly. Or if it was a complete accident, someone
forwarded an email and I didn't mean to, the lawyer is going to
look at that no different, you are responsible as the business
owner for protecting the information of your customers
inside your business. And it means that you need to make sure
you have made the commercial decision to protect your
business. Now, the way I like to think about this is if you stood
up in court, and you've got to protect and defend the decisions
that you made in your business, ask yourself, would I rather
have paid an extra couple of $1,000 to have this taken care
of and have the policies in place? So you have the
defensibility? Of here are the steps that we took? Or are you
willing to say no, you know what, we just didn't really
think about that one, the real cost of making sure you get this
done right is not the small investment you make now in
getting your implementation of workspace correct. It's what you
have to pay potentially in the future if you don't get it
right. If you're interested in an audit of your current
workspace account, jump on the link down below and our team
will be very happy to help. If you are someone who is
interested in learning more about all there is to do with
Workspace getting more out of your investment. Well check out
our other videos on our channel. And no matter what stage of
business you're at right now. We have information on helping you
build more productive and scalable and successful
businesses. We are all about the intersection of technology and
business and we want to help you to build better businesses with
Cloud tech. Until next time, see you