Your Data: Google and your data

Many customers have asked me about what access Google have to your data. And who is the owner of the data once its on Google Servers. 

As a reseller I questioned Google on this. 

Firstly Google Apps for Business/Education and NonProfit are different to the Free GMAIL and Google Apps Standard edition. Gmail and the Google Apps Standard Edition Google have systems (not humans) look at the content on your email and provide related advertising. 

With the premium services Google don't advertise and your data is managed differently. You own the data and always have access to it. (granted, you need to be online). Google enables you to always get access and extract your data from all their services any time you want. More information here at "The Data Liberation Front"

"The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products.  We do this because we believe that you should be able to export any data that you create in (or import into) a product.  We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to "liberate" their products."

Google also released a Security Whitepaper (good bed time reading) that covers their security for the email and collaboration products. Which can be downloaded here: ds_gsa_apps_whitepaper_0207.pdf

Realistically, no matter what email service you use, internally hosted with the best encryption within the best physical access controlled environment. If you doing something wrong, you will be caught and you will be forced to hand over your data. 

Google Apps Administrators can now move user documents

Google just released a blog post on Google Apps Document management. Many of our clients have had this issue before. When I user leave the organisation and created documents under their user account in Google Docs, there are a few steps to follow so that you can be sure all their documents are accessible once their account is removed. In the past you had to change their password, login as that user and then share the documents with someone else. And then if you managed to get all the documents shared, you need to take ownership. 

Not anymore, from within the Domain Control Panel, under Advanced Tools Tab; Administrators can now easily move a users Docs. This will save lots of time and ensure all data gets copied before an account gets deleted. 

Google Security

Few of customers asked the question "how secure is my data in the Cloud". Our standard response for a small to mid-size company is that Google spend a lot of Security dollars to ensure that data is secured. Well a lot more than what a smaller company can afford to pay a security team. Over the past few months google enhanced Google Apps security, one of these enhancements was 2-Factor Authentication (more on Wikipedia). This was rolled out at no additional costs. Basically its another password to access your email that changes every 30 seconds. An Application on your smart phone will have a rotating key code synced with the Google Authentication servers. When you login using your standard password on a computer you normally don't use,  you need to validate by entering this rotating code. (RSA Secure ID is a similar technology).

Today I found this video that Google released showing how they secure their data centres. Its worth a watch, take a 7 min break. 

You can read more on Google Apps Security page: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/infrastructure_security.html

Or contact us by complete the enquiry form and feel free to ask any other relating questions. Here

New Gmail feature: Send Mail in the background

This is a big one for most of us using the Google Mail service on a day to day basis. I managed to for myself to just get use to waiting when sending emails. Specially for emails with large attachments. Well no more! 

If you have access to Google Labs, on the Google Lab page you will find the option to enable background send. Once enables when you click send (or Tab+Enter for the Google Ninja's between us). You get the yellow info bar saying sending in the background. Then you can carry on using Gmail.

Good News for the Cloud!

This article from the AustralianIT.com.au section just came across my RSS reader.

"BIG business is not shying away from cloud computing, with a survey showing 50 per cent of local companies plan to use the platform."

It makes sense, Blueteq believes the benefits for business continuation and ease of deployment outweighs the fear of having control. We still encourage all companies to keep mindful of the security considerations.

Read the full article here on the Australian IT website