G Suite is a popular platform for many businesses to run their organization because it's any easy choice to make. G Suite comes from a universally trusted brand, it's easy and intuitive to use, and it makes collaboration and universal access possible for remote or mobile workforces.
Data within G Suite Apps, like financial spreadsheets or sales contacts and email records, is the foundation of critical processes for many businesses that use the platform. However, Google is not responsible for backing up your app data and many do not find this out until it's too late.
If G Suite is an important component of your business and its operations, a backup solution for G Suite is a necessity and here are some reasons why.
Google's disclaimer
While you may trust that your data is safely stored by Google, they cannot protect against user errors, hackers, ransomware, malicious actions, or unauthorized access from lost or stolen devices. Google guarantees the infrastructure they provide you as a service, but they do not guarantee your data within their infrastructure.
Google's disclaimer in their terms of service you agree to when signing up for a Google account states:
“We don’t make any commitments about the content within the Services. When permitted by law, Google, and Google’s suppliers and distributors, will not be responsible for lost profits, revenues, or data, financial losses or indirect, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages.”
Third-party applications
Malicious actions by 3rd party applications installed on your domain are becoming more of a problem.
While adding third-party apps to G Suite, an employee might click on the ‘allow’ button without question and give access without going through the list of permissions that are required for installing the application.
These permissions are actually a set of invisible threats that could become the gateway for a hacker to easily access your data.
Lost devices
G Suite is praised because it can be accessed ‘Anytime, Anywhere.’ You get used to keeping accounts signed in on multiple devices and don’t think about what could happen if a device is lost or stolen. It's convenient and we all do it.
But if a device is lost or stolen, it could expose access to critical business data and allow the deletion of the only copy of your files. Most of us utilize the ease of files shared and stored on Drive. Unless you have copies saved to your own drive or device, your data could be gone forever.
Overwritten data
The collaboration features of G Suite allow files and folders to be shared easily among team members, which improves synergy and efficiency. The disadvantage is the likelihood that an employee will overwrite data and/or accidentally delete a file is pretty high. A backup solution for G Suite is the only way to restore data that has been overwritten or accidentally deleted.
Outages
According to CNET, on March 13, 2019 Google suffered a global outage causing problems for users all over the world trying to access their Gmail and/or Drive. As stated above, Google's only guarantee is the SaaS infrastructure they provide users, however, any SaaS infrastructure is vulnerable to outages. This outage created havoc for businesses of all sizes that relied on the platform.
A backup solution for G Suite data would substantially ease the pain of such outages. Of course, it would not allow you access to the G Suite Apps during the outage, but you would have access to your data to continue work and you would have a safe copy if the outage effected your data.
Google tools are not enough
Google Takeout is a G Suite tool used for downloading data from all the Google Apps associated with a G Suite account. It’s a very handy tool, but you cannot download data in shared folders or download all the data in a single shot if it is more than 50 GB in size.
Google Vault is a tool for web-based archiving for G Suite used for searching & exporting data. However, Google Vault does not create a separate copy of your data so if data is deleted from G Drive, then it will be deleted from the archived files as well.
SEP Cloud Application Protection Service for G Suite
Any one of these reasons is enough to regret not backing up your G Suite data if you use G Suite for business critical data or to support business critical processes. SEP offers a backup solution for G Suite that is fully automated simple data protection. Unlimited backup of all data. Easily restore any data, including individual files or entire mailboxes, with just a few clicks. Empower your organization by extending data protection best practices to your cloud infrastructures with SEP.
SEP SaaS Backup for Office 365 and Salesforce are also available. Contact us to find out more about our backup solution or to start a free 30-day trial.
SEP SaaS Backup for Google Suite Free 30-Day Trial
