Peter Moriarty: If you are a growing business, and you're
finding that your technology costs are spiraling out of
control as you grow and scale a mid market business, well this
video is for you, we're going to be talking about ways that you
can optimize your hardware costs to get more value out of your
business as you're working with Google workspace. Now, many
businesses as they grow, end up taking advantage of hardware
leasing, or end up spending a lot of capital expenditure on
hardware for the business as it grows. And, you know, we find
ourselves buying monitors and computers and the latest whiz
bang machines for the business and for your employees. Now, in
this video, I'd like to share some of the benefits of
considering using Chrome hardware instead of Macs or PCs
in the business. Some of the pitfalls that businesses start
to fall into when they're considering chrome hardware. And
some of the benefits and advantages of working with is
pretty amazing tech, when you're rolling it out in a business.
Now, if you're a small or medium sized business owner, maybe
you've got 10 employees or less, it might be compelling for you
to buy one or two chrome machines and try them out and
see how they are with your team and potentially then roll them
out to the rest of your employees. But if you're a
larger organization, there are you know, specific benefits,
particularly around hardware lifecycle, and ensuring that the
manageability, and the policies of each piece of hardware that
you have is something that can be broadly managed across a
base. And you start to think about the hardware lifecycle of
different pieces of hardware, how long they last, you know,
what's the interoperability, what's the upgradability? And
all these questions, we're going to try and answer as we talk
about Chrome hardware. Now one of the most obvious advantages
of the chrome ecosystem is the big benefit in cost. And that is
because chrome machines don't have all the, you know, whiz
bang, latest processes that are needed, they don't need, you
know, crazy amounts of RAM or storage, because most of their
operations and heavy lifting is kind of done online in the
cloud. And the other great thing about Chrome hardware is because
it's Linux based, it's a little bit less of a hardware and
processor footprint than a normal computer would need. Now,
some of the other great advantages of actually working
with it is being able to connect the chrome hardware to your, you
know, ecosystem in terms of Google workspace. And I'm going
to talk a little bit about you know how some of the policies
are really helpful there. But really, the main difference that
it comes down to when you're actually supporting a fleet of
machines, particularly in a midsize and larger business, is
the cost of maintenance and the cost of support. Now, with a
traditional Mac or a PC, there's a lot of time spent on things
like updates, rolling out software, maybe imaging, or
versioning, your different machines to make sure that
everything is taken care of. And then you need to worry about
things like antivirus, protecting them, you know,
password protection, directory services, and all of these
require other services, other software, and know how in in
terms of your team actually managing them. Whereas with
Chrome, because it's a very simple system, you can manage
the policies from the cloud, right from the Google workspace
admin panel. And from there, there isn't really much day to
day management or maintenance needed on any one of these
machines. Because there's no real, you know, massive threats
around viruses or malware on Chrome machines. They're all
locked down with secure enclave technology, which means that the
account is fully locked down to your person's Google account or
the employee or you know, person in your organization, maybe
they're in a school, it's locked down to their Google account.
And it's all encrypted there as well, which is great. And
overall, there's there's less needing to kind of like open the
machines and tinker with them. And even tinker with the
operating system itself. You know, Chrome always copies a
second copy, carry, sorry, a second copy of the operating
system, so that anytime there's an issue with the machine, you
can actually just hit a power wash and completely wipe the
machine reenroll it and it's ready to go again, not only is
that like ease of management there, which means it's going to
cut down on the amount of time that your helpdesk spends
actually managing and monitoring the machines. But from a
security perspective, Chrome is absolutely amazing. Now, I
already mentioned that anyone's files that are local on a
Chromebook, are actually just connected intrinsically to
someone's Google account. And so they're locked down to all of
the security available in Google's account. But from an
actual local device perspective, if, for example, you're a
business, and you have a BYOD policy right now, which is bring
your own device, you can run into all kinds of problems with
the risk of losing business data. And that could be
something like your employees have files sitting in their My
Documents folder, or in a Mac in the Documents folder local to
the machine that actually are not backed up to the corporate
servers. And you've got to start to think about backup software
for the machines or you've got to try and educate the users on
saving things into you know, something like Google Drive. But
inevitably, you're going to have someone who doesn't follow the
rules. Or if you haven't done all of the overhead and actually
managing those individual machines. You know, maybe your
machine gets lost or stolen or broken. And you're potentially
going to have a data loss event in the business. Now, one
quarter of vija that Chromebooks have is you know, primarily most
of the work has been done online. So there's no real
backups that you need to worry about. For even for files that
are actually stored locally. On the Chromebook, you can set a
policy inside of Google workspace so that any files
downloaded or stored Click on the machine will automatically
synchronize to Google Drive. And the advantage of that is that if
anything happens to that local machine, it's all automatically
backed up to Google Drive. And you don't have to pay for extra
software. It's all just automatically done via a policy.
And there's no end user education required as well,
because it whole just happens as soon as they sign into the
account. Now, what I love about that is it means that you know,
anything happened, anything can happen with a local machine, and
the end user isn't, you know, adversely affected by something
going wrong, quite often, you know, and I've seen all kinds of
crazy stories, you know, in the old days, we would have
employees that would put emails into their rubbish bin and
outlook, and would get angry when we cleaned out the rubbish
bin when we were doing maintenance, because they'd say,
Well, I was saving those files for later. And I'm not here to
make fun of anyone. But I'm what I'm trying to convey is that
sometimes team members will work in a particular way, which is
not necessarily inside the it policy that we want. And they
might not think about what might happen to the computer breaking
or something going wrong with the computer and the files that
were not properly saved to the server. And so having these
policies in place are kind of like a catch all, which means
that, you know, nothing can really go wrong there. Now, the
next feature of deciding to work with Chrome OS as your operating
system. And remember, these come in both laptops and desktop
format, as well in Chrome boxes and other chrome hardware, is
that the speed of onboarding, being able to onboard an
employee really quickly, and we've got another video that we
recorded recently, just on onboarding and white glove
service, and what that means to getting your team all set up
when they're just starting in a new position. But getting your
team on board and quickly can be as simple as issuing a Google
account, putting them in the right group, and then allowing
them to sign into the new device, it's automatically going
to download bookmarks via policy if you've set that up in your
admin panel. And you can have all kinds of other features and
settings enabled on the local computer automatically via cloud
policy. Now, if you're working with a white glove service
provider, like a vendor or a consultancy like us, you can
even have the machine shipped directly to your employee. So
you don't even have to manage it yourself inside the business.
You just call up someone like us and say, hey, I've got a new
employee starting on Monday, and you set up their email and send
them a computer, and a service provider will be able to send
that straight to them. And that makes onboarding new employees
really simple and reduces the amount of stress and time taken
up on your IT team who were actually having to manually
implement and manually deploy devices. As you grow, you will
probably be making the shift from Mac and PC to Chrome OS, if
you're a business that's really interested in getting all of the
best benefits of the Google workspace ecosystem. And let me
tell you, this is a deliberate move, it takes planning, and
also you've got different stages of the move, and you're probably
not going to find everybody right across your organization
ready to adopt Chrome, right from the get go. It might be one
small group of users, it might be a group of VIP test users. So
we're going to try it out first, before a more broad rollout. Or
it might be you know, a number of executives trying out the
devices first and seeing if they like the vibe of working with
Chrome, it's always good to start at the top because you can
then have that culture filter through to the rest of the team.
But also be mindful that you're not necessarily going to get
100% penetration with Chrome OS, right across the organization.
It may be that only certain user profiles or work profiles are
actually going to get the best out of Chrome OS. And there
might be some jobs like the job of a graphic designer that just
can't be done on Chrome and is instead going to need to be on a
different operating system. Now, don't let that dishearten you,
you can still obviously build those user profiles and start
rolling it out progressively. And what we find is for most
organizations that roll out a few Chromebooks very quickly
that starts to spread. And they start to consider and even
challenge the reasons why you might be using other operating
systems across the business. Because what we know for every
business that rolls out Chrome, the support time, and the
effort, time required to manage the end devices drops
dramatically over time very, very quickly. So if you're
interested in learning more about Chrome if you're
interested in an audit for your organization, if you'd like to
set up a proof of concept and see if Chrome is a good fit for
you. Or if you just like to have a chat about Google workspace,
and how you might get more value out of the ecosystem and
Google's amazing platform for businesses and educational
institutions. Jump on the link right down below. You can apply
for an audit and our team will be in touch soon. If you haven't
already checked out the other videos on our channel. We've got
heaps of videos on growing and scaling your business technology
strategy and ensuring that you get the most out of your
investment in Google workspace. Check those out and I look
forward to seeing you in another video. If you're not already
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liked the video and send some comments down below if you'd
like some questions answered. We'll do our best to get to
those soon.