Have You Made the Switch to Google Apps for Business?

As your business starts to grow and you take on more employees, at some stage you will need to start thinking about the IT software and systems that power the way you work.

For almost three decades Microsoft Office has been the de facto choice for productivity software in offices and schools around the world, but in the past few years, Google has started to challenge this with their G Suite range of apps.

The G Suite range now includes a number of applications that are equivalent to the well-known Microsoft versions:

Why use Google Apps for Business?

Using Google Apps for Business comes with many great benefits:

• Cost – With the basic package starting at just £3.30 per user per month, G Suite is a very cost effective way of offering productivity tools to you employees and standardising the tools that people work on. This model means that you can easily flex up and down as your company grows.
  
• Security – Using cloud-based storage and applications means that you have less data stored locally that you have to look after. For instance, if your laptop is lost or stolen you don’t lose any of your files as they are all saved remotely. Similarly, you are at less risk of your systems being hacked and data compromised as your applications are hosted in Google’s data centres, and have Google’s security engineers worrying about how best to protect them.
• Collaboration – G Suite comes with excellent built-in collaboration features, making it much easier for your teams to work together, even if they are remote teams spread across different locations. Not only does it include video and voice conferencing, but also the ability to share documents and for multiple people to edit documents at the same time.
• Flexibility – As Google Apps are cloud-based this makes working flexibility really easy. You can access your files from virtually any device, from anywhere in the world. This includes viewing and editing documents on your smartphone. These types of features are particularly attractive if you want to build a flexible working culture where employees are allowed to work from home.  

The “Business” and “Enterprise” packages come with other additional features such as data leakage prevention tools and audit logs to track usage, making them suitable for larger companies.

Migrating to Google Apps for Business

As Microsoft products are so deeply embedded in many organisations, uptake of Google Apps for business was initially among smaller businesses and solo entrepreneurs. Recently however many larger organisations have started to look at whether they can use Google apps to act as a challenger to Microsoft and help reduce their costs.  

One notable example is the Spanish bank BBVA, which started migrating over 100,000 users across to Google Apps in 2012.

If you’re looking to streamline and standardise the tools that your employees are using, or want to increase productivity by introducing new collaboration tools, Google Apps for Business could be the right option for you.

Contact us today if you would like to benefit from our industry expertise during your transition to Google Apps for business.