October 16, 2009
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Affordably Build Your Brand
FedEx Global Brand Management Director Monica Skipper shares a cost-effective way to build a bigger brand for your small business.
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Google is not just about search and advertising – it also has a focus on business products. Its best known enterprise product is probably Google Apps, a suite of web productivity tools that includes Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. Google’s business version is customizable and placed on your domain.
Google Apps has many advantages – it’s affordable, collaborative, and supported by Google technology – but recently there’s been criticism of the search company’s business suite, especially in the realm of security. This is after a series of high profile security breaches of corporate Google Apps accounts, primarily Twitter’s security meltdown in July.
This places managers and small business owners considering switching to Google Apps in a tough position. Google Apps has a slew of benefits, but if there’s a security problem it’s a deal breaker, especially if they deal with secure information daily. How concerned should you be about security with Google Apps? Here are some things to consider:
- Google Apps has one layer of security: Like 95% of web apps, Google Apps has one major layer of security: a username and password. If someone can figure that out, then they can get into your Google Apps accounts. This is essentially what happened at Twitter.
- Google Apps is in the cloud: Google’s services are all hosted on Google’s cloud and accessible through the web. If you don’t want your data on any other server but your own, Google Apps is not for you.
- Google Apps is built for collaboration. Other tools are built for security: You won’t find Bank of America using Google Apps, as it deals with sensitive financial information every day. Sometimes it’s better to build your own collaboration tools, especially when you’re a larger business dealing with financial or classified data.
- Google is not lax on security: The company understands how important security is to business and is constantly improving its security structure. It’s already pretty good.
- You can always add your own level of security: It’s simple enough to encrypt specific sections of your domain or host your most sensitive documents on a private server. Security isn’t just in the control of Google or another app provider.
- Improving personal security is the best way to be secure: Most of the time, security isn’t breached by some sophisticated hack, but by a kid guessing someone’s username and password. Train all of your employees on creating passwords with random characters and teach them to never use the same password for multiple programs and web apps.
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ALLEN FALCON 2 years 7 months and 6 days ago
Security should always be a primary concern of small businesses. Properly configured, the security of Google Apps surpasses the security that most small and mid-size business can provide and afford for their internal systems. And, businesses with truly sensitive information can add two-factor authentication services for pennies per day.