We’ve listened to many businesses share what’s important to them in building and growing a healthy business. What we’ve found is that businesses are looking for a low-cost, reliable, and secure messaging and collaboration solution that supports their business rather than challenges it. If your business finds itself identifying with some of these challenges, then you might be interested in considering the Google Apps solution for your business.

Take a look at the business advantages of Google Apps that our customers have found out for themselves.

Business challenges:

• Cost and resource-draining IT challenges, such as unreliable servers, setup and maintenance expenses, and operating a multi-OS environment
• Small email inboxes
• Virus attacks, Spam and phishing
• Compliance to internal and external policies
• Consumption of disk space
• Inefficient sharing and collaboration

How Google Apps solves these business challenges:

• Dramatically lowers your total cost of ownership with an annual $50 fee for each user account. No hidden maintenance or upgrade expenses – since Google hosts your data, we absorb those costs so that you don’t have to.
• Boost employee productivity with 25GB of storage per user – your employees can focus on their work rather than on their email quota.
• Lean on our 99.9% service level agreement for email to make sure your business is up-and-running.
• Share information, don’t send it. Real-time document editing cuts down the hassle of sending email attachments and version confusion.
• You’re actually safer with Google Apps. Since your data is hosted on Google’s reliable and redundant data centers, you can stop saving your corporate data on insecure devices, a leading cause of data security problems.
• Better message control over what comes in and what goes out of your company with Google Apps’ message security and administrative management controls.
• Access anywhere, anytime you have an internet connection – whether on your mobile device, laptop, or computer in a multi-OS environment (PC, Mac, Linux).

We understand that employees want to be able to work where they want when they want, to do so they are taking the data with them. Businesses are finding themselves in the position where more and more employees are burning corporate data onto CD/DVD, thumb drives, putting data on their home machines to work on in the evenings and weekends. This has created serous security concerns, because not only do these incidents expose the data to unwanted eyes but often times we lose the data permanently since much of data resides on laptops or desktops.

As such, we take the privacy and security of our Google Apps customer data very seriously. Security is core to our DNA at Google. Our products are designed with security considerations upfront, not as afterthoughts, and our Security team is comprised of some of the world’s leading experts in information, application and network security. Our infrastructure is composed of tens of thousands of identical systems, and we have custom built hardware. Our machines are built on a custom Linux software stack that is hardened and only has the necessary components and services to run the Google requirements, making it easy to uniformly update of all systems. Each single piece of data is replicated in multiple datacenters, so your Google Apps email is replicated to a primary and a backup data center, that are replicated in real time. We also undergo regular security reviews by third parties and SAS 70 audits by an independent third party.

We fully believe in the security of our Google Apps environment that we store our own Google corporate data in the same environment.

Also keep in mind the following:

• Google does not claim ownership of your data.
• We don’t share your data except as strictly outlined in our Privacy Policy.
• We keep the data as long as you want.
• We delete the data when you ask.
• We allow you to take the data out of our system if you decide to switch to a different solution, or if you want to use your data in another application or integrate with other systems.

Not at all. You request a total number of users at a domain and then you can delete and create accounts to stay within that user account limit. This is useful for companies with high employee turnover rates such as interns and temps as you will not have to purchase additional accounts to replace these users.

With the old employee’s data, Google will purge it when deleted. You can also migrate the data away from Google. Keep in mind that you can’t change the account’s username, however you can add nicknames to handle the revolving door of employees.