Are you a new Google Workspace administrator? How do you enforce effective and secure policies? Here are some of my best tips.
Did you find this video helpful? Let us know by dropping a comment below!
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
Transcription:
So next up, I’d like to talk about tips for new admins. And these are my best tips for anyone who’s just become responsible for managing a Google workspace account. So maybe you’re an IT consultant, or you’re someone who works in an organization and you’ve been labeled as the IT person. Or maybe you’re a business owner, who wants to just, you know, make sure they know the basics of how things run inside their workspace account, I’m going to give you five of my best tips for things that we educate all business owners on to make sure that you know when you get started inside your fresh workspace account.
First up is enabling two factor authentication. And I’ve talked about this on nearly every single live stream that I do. But I will continue to talk about this on nearly every single live stream that I do, because it’s absolutely mandatory. Switching on two factor authentication, not just for your account, but also for everyone in the business and enforcing that across all of your Google accounts, is the number one way that you can stop your accounts becoming compromised, and having data shared, or potentially from having spam emails sent out on your behalf on your domain, which looks terrible in front of other business owners and your audience. Maybe your clients, maybe your your, your contacts, maybe your suppliers, you just don’t want that to happen. So when you switch on two factor authentication, and it’s super, super simple to do, what that does is actually locks down your accounts so that when someone has your username or your password, hopefully you’re the only person that does but if anyone else gets access to your username and password for your Google account, when they go to login, it’s going to drop a text message down to your mobile phone. And from there, you will have to enter that six digit code before anyone can get access to the account, which means it’s safe and secure from any hackers or anyone who gets access to your account. Now, I’m going to guess that you probably use the same password for your Google account, then you do that you do for other accounts, and most people do. It’s absolutely no shame. But when you do that, it means that if someone compromises another website, they may already have your Google password. And the first thing they’re going to try is your business account.
Second tip is to consider backing up. And this is for you to protect your data inside your Google account, and ensure that not just protecting from the risk of something happening with Google, because that’s pretty damn impossible. But more protecting from the risk of human error. What can happen inside a business is that from time to time, staff will think they’re doing the right thing and do a cleanup of a Google Drive. Or maybe you’ve worked with a contractor in the past, and they’ve got all their files owned by a Gmail account, and they just shared it with you, but they’re still the owner of the files. Well, what can happen is when that person goes and cleans up their account, all those files disappear from your Google Drive. And if you’re not using the shared drives feature, then you don’t basically have control or ownership over those files. And so having a backup in place can protect you from those kind of events. But also having a backup in place can protect you from the evil cryptolocker virus. And a cryptolocker virus, or ransomware, as it’s sometimes called, is when someone encrypts all of the files on your computer, and they start demanding Bitcoin to decrypt them, and for you to get your data back. Now it sounds like a bit of a laughing matter. We’ve all had, you know, one or two people that we probably know about that have had that happen. But the very real risk is not only the downtime in your business, but also the potential to not actually get those files back. Now you might think people aren’t safe, you know, I’ve got it in Google Drive, and Google Drive is in multiple locations. And that’s correct that Google Drive does store your data in multiple locations. But as soon as your computer is infected with one of these viruses, it actually synchronizes all of those changes across to Google and the cloud, and to Google on your other devices. And you can restore from backup inside your Google Drive account. But you have to do each file one by one. If you’ve got 10,000 files in your Google Drive, one by one, you have to restore every single one of those files. Now, why don’t Google have a click button point in time restore? I don’t know, we’ve tried going through support, they won’t do it either. And so the only way to prevent that is to have a backup for your Google accounts, which is one of the features of our concierge service. If you’re interested in checking that out, we actually give free disaster recovery cloud backup licenses for all Google workspace users who are concierge customers. So if you’re interested in that, jump on the link below and check out our concierge program and see if we are a good fit to work with you for your support needs.
Hot Tip number three, let’s talk about Device Management. And so I strongly recommend enabling Device Management inside your Google workspace account. Now you may not know that this exists, but there is the ability to actually control the mobile devices within your business from within your workspace account. Now what that means is you can enforce policies onto the mobile devices like every device in my business should have a passcode every device in the business should have encryption enabled on the backups every device in the business may Do you want to lock down the camera, if you’ve got staff that are entering hospitals, I know that’s a bit of a weird one. But we have medical customers who have those kind of policies that want to put in place. At an absolute minimum, you should make sure that each one of your staff has a passcode on their phone. Because if they don’t, if they’re on the train, they leave their phone there, all of a sudden, all of your business data is exposed to whoever picks it up. Or if their passcode is 1111, you can enforce things like making sure they actually have a decent passcode on their phone, because anyone who steals the phone is going to try something like that first. Now, to enable Device Management inside of Google workspace, it’s pretty straightforward, you head to the admin panel. And you can see here that once I’ve gone to devices and endpoints, I can configure the settings in here. But every one of my stuffs phones actually connects inside the workspace account. And I can see the last time that it connected. And with some phones, I can even remote wipe them. So if you have a staff member who maybe hasn’t bothered to enable something like Find My iPhone, and they lose their phone, and you’re concerned about having company data on that phone, you can actually choose to with one button, either wipe all the data, or do what’s called a corporate wipe, and a corporate wipe is basically wiping only the business data. And that can all happen remotely. So that’s Device Management inside of workspace. And if you’d like any help configuring that, then let our team know to work with you on that one.
Next up is to double check your DNS. We know that most people who configure Google workspace themselves don’t get it quite correctly. And by that I mean, you just don’t know what you don’t know. Now for many business owners setting up DNS, SPF DKM. And demark are not the kind of things that you kind of naturally know how to do, unless you’ve got a background in it. And most people will follow the wizard on Google, which just tells you how to do one step of the process. But there’s actually three more steps that you need to get done to make sure your emails don’t land in people’s spam. And so if you’re finding that your emails are going to people spam from time to time, or you’re not receiving all of your emails, or maybe your emails are coming through slowly, then you may have an issue with your DNS. Or you might be blissfully unaware, you might not have an issue at all, maybe your email emailing out customers from your database. And that might be MailChimp or Infusionsoft. And you’re just getting really poor open rates and wondering why you might that might be so well, if you don’t have your DNS configured correctly, then they may be some symptoms that come up for you. So I’m going to share with you how to check it out yourself. And that is to go to this URL, it genius.com forward slash DNS. And when you go to that URL, it will take you to a Google website, which helps you to check your domain name. Now when I enter this URL, let’s go there now. And that’s going to run checks on my domain. You can see here that we have that issue with SPF on my domain. And this is something that our team will need to look at. But everything else has been confirmed. Now if you run this report, and you find that there’s any issues with your domain, you might be interested to check out our video on checking your domain and DNS settings for your account that’s on our YouTube channel.
Next up, let’s get your profiles sorted. Now, inside of your workspace account, you can do some really groovy things like automatically pushing down and enforcing your team to use certain plugins and add ons inside Google Chrome. And so any add ons that you want the whole team to use, like maybe LastPass for your password security, or maybe you want everyone to use a certain kind of screenshot tool or loom for recording videos, where you can actually push those down. So anytime a newcomer starts inside your business, they will automatically have the correct plugins available inside Google Chrome. But for that to work, everyone needs to be logged into Google Chrome with all of their business email address, and all of their business data will actually synchronize into Google Chrome. Now, how do you do that, when you first log into Chrome, or open the Chrome browser, you’ll see you have the option to sign in. And you want to make sure you’re signed in with your business account. When you sign in with your business account. All of the business policies apply automatically. And it means that anything that you set inside the chrome settings inside the admin panel will be pushed down to each person’s machine. So if I go to my Google Admin Panel here, I’ll just go back to the dashboard, show where it is. And of course, it’s going to ask me to sign in again. Thanks, Google. So if I go into my admin panel, I need to go to devices. And then you can see we have Chrome devices. And Chrome devices includes all of the settings for managing Google Chrome. All right, hopefully, that was useful, guys. I’m going to give you a little bonus and that is to make use of shared drives. Now, many business owners if they’ve been using Google a long time, maybe with Gmail I’m not quite aware that shared drives exists. And shared drives is a special place inside of Google Drive for those using the Business Standard accounts and above, which lets you have excellent and more advanced sharing properties and permissions for your Google account. So when I go into my shared drives, here, you can see I’ve got a number of shared drives already set up and configured for my Google account. And each one of these shared drives allows me to set different levels of access for different team members. So when I go to Manage members here, you can see I can manage different groups of people. And I can allow each one of them to have different levels of access. Now, one of the best features of shared drives is the ability to set up a shared drive, where staff or even people outside the business can place files into the drive, but they’re not allowed to take files back out. And so if you’ve got anyone you’re working with who’s a contractor or not a permanent employee of the business, you may want to set up a shared file so they can actually contribute files, but not have the ability to delete or even move them. And it allows you to keep your Google Drive nice and cleanly organized. I love this feature, because it means that for my team members, I know that any shared file they’re working on when they share it with the team, once they plunk it in that shared drive, it’s then owned by the company and no longer owned by the individual. And that’s especially useful if you have anyone outside the business that you want to collaborate with, just to make sure that you’re keeping all of your company data secure.
Now, we can help you if you are a member of our concierge service, just let us know drop us an email. If you want help with anything you’ve seen in this presentation, we’ll be very happy to help out. And if you don’t already know, you can just chat to us via messenger, just chat to it genius. And it is nice and easy for you to get access to our team. If you’re not yet a member of cloud concierge, well, you may be interested in a free consultation with our team, we’ll do a full audit of your Google workspace account and help make sure that things are set up correctly, we are all about helping businesses grow and getting you to the scale stage, which means that you as a business owner has a lot more time for freedom and time to do more of the things you love, and a business that works for you. And so we want to make sure the right technology is in place at the right stages of your business. So you’ve got the right foundation in place to build a really, really great company with technology at the forefront of your strategy. So if you’re interested in working with us, and you’re not quite ready for concierge, that’s absolutely fine, you might be interested to take advantage of our transfer in offer. And that is completely free and available to all businesses on Google workspace. Now when you transfer your billing to us, it doesn’t cost you any more for the licenses. But you get access to a bunch of features. Now you get access to the IQ genius classroom, which is a library of free videos, which show you how to get things done inside your Google account. So a lot of the things that we cover on our YouTube channel, don’t go into the technical nitty gritty, because we save that for customers who can reach out to us for support if they need it. You also get access to our continuous support team. For some free support, it is limited, but you do get access to some free support from our team. When you are transferred into your billing with us. We will also check your DNS records and we’ll make sure you’ve got them done correctly. So you don’t have to go watch our 30 minute video on how to do it yourself. I will help work through your DNS records. And you will have access to your account if you are ever hacked or locked out. Unfortunately, we see this all the time. Either someone gets hacked and someone steals their identity and takes their Google account or maybe have a cryptolocker you know, type hacker person get into your account and and hold it ransom for you all sometimes it’s an ex partner or or you’ve forgotten your password too many times and you get kicked out all kinds of different reasons why that might happen. We have a safe backdoor to your account when we are managing your billing which means that you’ve always got us as a backup. And also you get access to exclusive workplace promotions. When discounts happen, which are often you always get access to those by being a customer of ours. So if you’re interested in that, headlong to it genius.com forward slash transfer, transfer your billing to us. There’s absolutely no downside doesn’t cost you any extra and a bunch of goodies. Now if you’re interested in connecting with that team, head along to it genius.com forward slash chat or you can drop us an email help at it genius.com and we will be very happy to help you out.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
