If you're the owner of a business or an IT manager, and
your business is growing, you may be worried about the
spiraling costs of it, and the security holes that start to
appear in an organization as you grow and add more and more
people. In this video, I'm going to share some of the most common
challenges that start to come up for growing businesses and what
you can do about them. As a business grows. Typically,
business owners will just throw more and more and more people at
the processes of a business. The challenge is that technology
strategy doesn't always keep up with what's being thrown at the
growth of the business. And quite often, we're just adding
more and more people. But we're not necessarily having our
technology systems become more efficient as we grow. And that's
where an effective CIO or CTO will be thinking about how the
technology systems should become more efficient and better
supporting of the business as you add more humans into the
mix. So I'm going to cover some of the most common things that
can go wrong, and what you can do about it to make sure that
you're keeping tabs on the right things as your business grows.
First up, I want to talk about subscription overwhelm. And this
is something that kind of starts in a small business, typically
with an entrepreneur that has bright shiny object syndrome,
who's floating back and forth between different tools, and the
next latest tool comes out and they put their credit card in
for a trial. And all of a sudden, you end up with lots and
lots of different ways of doing things. Quite often when
businesses are in the early stages as well, you'll be
looking for a best practice tool or a best in class tool. And
what that tool might be used for is a particular task or a
particular function in the business. And let's say, as a
broad example, you use something like zoom instead of Google
meat, or you use something like Slack, instead of Google Chat to
use for your business in the early days. Now what can happen
is as a business starts to grow, whereas you're just paying for
licenses, adding more and more users, all of a sudden that cost
can get out of control. And quite often, we find that
businesses and business owners have not quite taken a step back
and had a look at evaluating whether or not that product is
actually the right product for the task at hand. Sometimes when
you are so fast sunk into costs or so far sunk into a solution,
it's difficult to step back and say, Hey, what do we pick this
solution if we were to make the decision again, now, now,
subscription overwhelm happens, where you have multiple tools
that are potentially having overlap in the jobs or the tasks
that they're doing. For example, using zoom instead of Google
meet. When you have a Google meet solution there, it's
perfectly good to use or using slack instead of Google Chat
when you've got a perfectly good chat solution to use there. Now
we've got separate videos on why you might choose meet over zoom
and why you might choose Google Chat over slack. And I am biased
in recommending Google workspace because of the work that we do.
But it's not without merit that for you to use the Google
ecosystem simplifies the way that you're working, and could
potentially save you 1000s, if not 10s of 1000s of dollars a
year in your IT spend by not doubling up on tools that you
don't need. So the easiest way to deal with subscription
overwhelm, is to ask yourself for each application that you
have what I choose this application, again, if I had my
time over, and in some cases, the small amount of upfront pain
of making the switch to another application, hopefully in the
Google world to save you some money and make it a little bit
simpler, that is likely to reap rewards for many years into the
future. getting stuck along the road with a external application
outside of your main subscription. Google workspace
means that there's more to maintain, more to protect, and
more potential security vulnerabilities, particularly
when staff are coming and going in a fast growing business. The
second point that I want to share is about security. And
that is that usually as businesses grow, and they start
to add, more and more headcount, security can start to become a
little bit lacks. And what I mean by that is just making it
easy and convenient for everyone to access the information that
they need, can lead to unfortunately, cross pollination
of information that might not be suitable for everyone. An
example of this would be having one large company drive or
shared drive set up in Google drives. And within that drive,
having sub folders with marketing and Finance and
Administration and all the different areas of the business,
although it might not be appropriate for each person in
the business to access each one of those sub folders. And so a
more thoughtful way of categorizing that would be for
each department to have their own shared drive, and group
permissions set up for each one of those shared drives. So
they're locked down and protected just to the correct
people in the business to access those files. Now, we have other
videos on how to organize your groups so they can be mapped to
your organizational structure, and even how to set up the
Google Drive folders. So you can make sure that they are all
neatly organized, and only the right people have access.
There's a link to that down below. But let's talk about when
things go wrong inside of shared folders or sharing inside of
Google Drive. If it's not done correctly in Google workspace
with the right prediction policies. One of the biggest
risks to organizations is information flowing out of the
organization, and that might be financial reports, it might be
customer information. And for any business over $2 million of
revenue in Australia, you can run into real trouble with the
Privacy Act by exposing Your customer information outside the
business. There are even jail terms for anyone who makes
serious breaches of these laws. And so it's something really
serious for directors to make sure they're paying attention to
now one of the largest risks is files being shared outside the
organization. And thankfully, there are some simple policies
that you can configure inside of Google workspaces admin panel,
which locked down the sharing from Google Drive. For example,
you can choose for a shared drive not to allow any files to
be shared outside the organization, or even outside
the shared drive that it's a part of. There's other ways to
lock down files as well like restricting the ability to copy,
print, or even make a download of those files. Now the
challenge is that we have a layer of convenience to balance
with security. And I like to think of that as a bit of a
seesaw. We're always trying to find this balance between not
inconveniencing our users and being able to keep our users
trained and on track with basic security principles, but also
having enough security that the business is well protected. And
intellectual property is not at risk. The simplest way I like to
describe how you should do your it policies is simple policies,
strong enforcement, make sure the policy is super, super easy
to follow, but enforce it strongly. Now, one of the
examples of that is anytime a file is shared with an org, it's
not shared individually via share link. files are only
allowed to be shared by placing them into a shared drive. And
what that creates is a culture of your team, putting files in
the right place and storing them neatly. And then they are only
ever shared with those who are members of the shared drive.
Which means that only the people who shouldn't be looking at the
document can actually look at the document. So simple policy,
strong enforcement make that a blanket rule for everyone. The
final tip in this video is to ensure that your onboarding and
offboarding technical policies are nice and tidy, easy to
follow for your HR team, but promote good security practices
for your business. For example, what I've seen in many
businesses is when they issue a new account to a staff member,
they will have a password that has been generated by the person
setting it up. And it might be company name, hashtag 123. And
that's definitely not a secure password, although sometimes it
can actually get through the password filters. When you're
configuring a new account. The best security policy would be to
when you issue a new account to someone in the organization to
force them to change the password and set up their own
fresh password. And you can set up password policies to have
your team refresh their passwords every certain amount
of time within the business. Now I would say up to 90 days at a
time would be a good length of time for a password for your
team to refresh them really quickly. Or if you want to allow
that to be a little bit more relaxed, you can go for 180 or
even 365 days when you're onboarding new staff. You also
want to make sure that part of your technical onboarding policy
includes putting your employees in the right user groups in
those user groups, which will spread to your chat, which will
spread to your drive and which will spread to your calendars as
well. They are the place that you make sure that the right
permissions only go to the right people, then you're no longer
adding anyone manually 20 files or any resources, it's all
automatically happening with group files. Now even if you're
a small business, and you only have 10 odd employees in the
business, you're not yet in the big game of scale mode, it's
still a good idea to set up group based permissions. Because
what this does is it builds the discipline of good security
practice inside the business. And you can make sure that your
onboarding saves a bunch of time by being able to add one person
to one group and give them access to all the resources that
they need. One of the favorite tricks that I love about using
groups for calendar invitations is for example, if you have an
all hands meeting, when a new employee joins and they're added
to the group, they will retro actively receive a notification
and an invitation to join that recurring meeting calendar
invite. It's a great feature of groups. And when coupled with
calendar. It works fantastically for recurring meetings. Now,
don't forget your onboarding process as well. When you have
someone leave the business, you want to make sure you've got the
right processes in place to clean up their accounts,
redirect their email, and potentially even archive their
accounts. If you're interested in help with your onboarding and
offboarding processes. We've got some great frameworks in place.
And we can even tailor custom onboarding and onboarding
processes to your particular business. Now if you're a
business owner or an IT leader, and you're wondering, where
should I start with reviewing the security of my Google
workspace account, but I recommend you consider an audit
with our team. Jump on the link below to request an audit. And
if you're eligible, our team will reach out to you and
discuss everything that's going on inside your workspace
account. We'll check the basics like your DNS settings and jump
into some of the more advanced policies. But really, we're
looking to help you get the most out of your investment in Google
workspace, whether you're a business or an educational
organization, or even an offer profit. If you'd like some help
from our team, jump on the link below. Otherwise, check out the
rest of the videos on our YouTube channel. I look forward
to seeing you sometime soon. If you haven't already subscribed,
please do that. Drop us a thumbs up if you liked this video. And
if you've got any comments or feedback, drop them just below
and we'll catch you soon.