Google Workspace (G Suite) has become an essential resource in today’s businesses.
Most organizations keep all of their data in the cloud office suite. But when they fail to protect it, they may put their entire business at risk.
As a manager or IT specialist, you need to ensure that all your critical business data is protected by a modern and reliable Google Workspace backup solution. This overview by Afi, a backup vendor, shows that the Google Workspace backup vendors greatly differ in terms of the quality, performance and reliability of their solutions, and that some of the solutions do not provide adequate protection.
Why Google Workspace Data is important
Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) is a collection of SaaS-based productivity applications from Google. Google makes sure that your data is protected from unauthorized physical access, server faults and downtime. It is still vulnerable to user mistakes, misconfiguration, hacker attacks and ransomware.
Google Workspace is often used to store the most critical organization’s data and its loss can halt your business’ operations. According to the Ninth Annual Cost of Cybercrime Study by Accenture, “the expanding threat landscape and new business innovation are leading to an increase in cyberattacks — the average number of security breaches in the last year grew by 15 percent from 130 to 145.” The growing number of cyberattacks mean an average organization is likely to suffer from one sooner or later.
Google Workspace has very basic built-in backup capabilities, and in most cases you need to use a third-party backup solution in order to keep your emails, files, and contacts safe.
The Debate Around SaaS Backup
Since Google Workspace is a SaaS (Software as a Service), many IT specialists assume that it does not require backup and protection. Unlike traditional on-premise email servers, Google Workspace is not subject to hardware or network failures, creating the illusion of the complete built-in protection.
At the same time, cloud data is often lost for the same reasons as on-premise. Google Workspace can be misconfigured and even its data can get corrupted over time (due to hardware and logical failures it Google systems).
How Google solves these problems
According to a white paper by Google, “Google designs the components of our platform to be highly redundant. This redundancy applies to our server design, how we store data, network and Internet connectivity, and the software services themselves. This ‘redundancy of everything’ includes the handling of errors by design and creates a solution that is not dependent on a single server, data center, or network connection.” In the event of hardware, software, or network failure, data is automatically moved from one facility to another to always be available to users. This means that Google makes sure that it has your back in case their systems are compromised.
Above being said, Google did lose customer data in the past, although such occurrences have been rare.
Should you still back up your data?
If Google’s system is designed to ensure that your data is safe, why would you still need to backup your data? Human error is the number one reason for SaaS data loss, followed by ransomware and other malware types that can corrupt your cloud data.
Around 80% of companies say they’ve lost SaaS data, and 47% said that the reason for data loss was because of users accidentally deleting data. Your files, contacts, emails, data within spreadsheets, and other documents are all at risk of being deleted, and once it’s deleted, it’s usually gone for good.
