If Google leaves Australia, what does that mean for you? What will happen to your data, and how should you protect it? Where all your files are stored, and what laws apply to your data? We answer your questions in this video.
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To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
Transcription:
For anyone who is not yet familiar with itGenius or who we are what we do, we are really passionate about helping small business owners play a bigger game. And that means more flexibility, more time freedom and making more money in your business. Now our focus is technology, we’re all about helping you get the right technology strategy in place, so that it will be a great foundation for building a really great business. But for us, we’re really all about helping small business owners, you know, build a better business have happier teams. And we think that is our way that we can help improve and serve the world. So we’ve got quite a large team ourselves, we’ve grown and ballooned our team through, you know, international resourcing and through good technology strategy internally, and through serving our customers well, and we now like to share that with the rest of the world and share that with you guys. Now, we take businesses through our growth roadmap, which is basically the different stages of technology strategy, and different stages of technology adoption, as you go through different stages of business. And so having worked with 1000s, and 1000s of business owners, we know kind of what hurdles you’ve come up against at different stages of business. So like, if you’re just getting started, the kind of things you need to make sure you get right are getting your file sharing done, getting some task management, so you can delegate tasks to other team members, when you’re in growth mode, and you’ve got like more than five, six employees, and the business is kind of, you know, proven the business model, but you’re starting to kind of like shoot up into growing up as a business, you want to make sure that you’ve got good technology systems, they’re going to support your business processes. So things like a CRM system for your sales process management have something like copper CRM, which we implement and resell. And then when once your scale business, you’ve got more than 20 employees. And that’s really the ultimate goal for us to graduate you to a scale business. At that point, it’s really things like KPIs, building out your dashboards, building out it policies inside the business, and making sure that your business has everything it needs to continue to be successful as you grow and change throughout the business.
So let’s talk about your data sovereignty inside Google workspace. And what this means is understanding and knowing where your files are actually stored, and understanding the importance of managing and maintaining your data storage. Now, for most business owners, when we use a cloud service, like Dropbox, or like Google Drive, we just kind of like leave it and don’t worry about it, we sign up for the service. And all we really worry about is, you know, does this service work for me. And we don’t do much more thinking about that. But if you’re in, for example, the healthcare industry or financial services, or accounting or consulting, and you’re potentially covered under the Australian privacy principles as an example, or maybe PCI DSS because you’re handling credit cards, then understanding where your data is being stored, is something that’s pretty important. And understanding how the mechanics of that actually works is important as well. Now we all know the basics, that obviously, when you put something in cloud storage, it’s going to go to an encrypted location. And that’s going to be sitting somewhere in a data center. And those data centers are going to be replicated across different geographically dispersed locations. And what that means is that your data is safe, if something happens to go wrong with that provider. Now, it’s highly, highly unlikely that any cloud provider is going to lose data on you by having a data center failure. The way that these data centers and the you know, data storage structures have been engineered, is basically the best in class in the world. It’s just so highly, highly unlikely. And I’ve worked with 1000s of businesses 10s of 1000s of employees across our customer base over more than 10 years with Google workspace. And I’ve only had one instance where I had a broken spreadsheet, we’ve had one or two times where we’ve had to go to Google support where something’s actually broken on Google’s side. It’s just so harlot highly unlikely that it’ll happen. But that’s not the only rest of your data. And we’re gonna go through what some of the actual risks are. Now, for most people, not all your data is even all in the cloud, much of it is, you know, kind of sitting around on your desktop. And I totally understand that we have other videos on a YouTube channel about how you can use Google Drive to actually backup all of the data on your computer, including the stuff that’s like sitting down there on your desktop as well. But your files are not only stored inside your country, when you put them on cloud storage, they also get stored in different data centers all over the world. And Google basically say, Well, once you, once you put your data inside Google Drive, we’re going to replicate it wherever we want to. And so Google have the choice about where your data gets replicated. Now, if you are a Google workspace, enterprise customer, there are some options to have some of your data domiciled in certain locations. So you can choose certain countries to put some of your data. It’s not available on the business plans, but it is available on the enterprise plans. And you also do have some control if you’re using storage inside of Google Cloud Platform as well. But for the most part when we’re using a service like Gmail, and we’re a small business, that’s just going to basically go anywhere, wherever Google feel like putting it so when we have data in multiple locations, We have it in different countries immediately, the fear starts to come into our minds about the US Patriot Act, and particularly for Australians, when people, you know, started putting their data in the cloud, we really started getting very worried about is my data safe from the picking eyes of the US government? And, you know, that’s a that’s a fair concern, you know, does someone who has the power to walk into a data center and request data to be supplied to them? You know, is that is that something that I should be concerned about? That’s a very fair question. And the other thing is that within that Patriot Act, you don’t necessarily have to be notified as a user, that that data is being collected on you. So that is also potentially scary thought as well. And so I’ve got many, many thoughts on this. But my number one thought is, and you may not know this, but the Australian intelligence authority, which is called acio, actually has exactly the same powers over your data. And I would say, even more overbearing ability to walk into a data center and take data. And so if you’re concerned about your data being in a particular country, at there’s really no cause for concern with that at all, because the Australian government can do exactly what the US government can do. And let me tell you, the government do not care about your data, they do not have the time to care about your data unless you’re doing something illegal. So if you are doing something illegal, the data is not really going to be safe anywhere, unless you’re using an encrypted chat on blackberries, which is I think, what the drug dealers use these days, or maybe encrypted WhatsApp, without a backup, your backups are not encrypted. Just remember that for any dealers or international crime syndicates, it might be on the live stream. But basically, the Australian government can do anything that US government. So hopefully, that will dissolve the fear about if my daughter’s goes to the US, then it’s unsafe. But the next most obvious thing to think about is well, okay, well, you know, what if the government wants to get into my daughter, what if someone else wants to get into my data, and the thing that I find complete comfort in is that my data is encrypted between my machine and Google. And so even if I’m working out of a dodgy hotel Wi Fi, between me and Google, as long as I’m using the online web apps, it’s a secure encrypted connection. And so what that means is that no one can see any of the data going back and forward. And it’s also encrypted when it sits on Google servers. Now, can Google get access to your data? Yes, if you put in a support request, and you actually get grant them access to your data, then they can go and get access to your data, can the local cops down the road get access to your data? Well, if they send a request through to me through the courts, then I may actually have to give them the data. And I do not necessarily have to notify users as well. That’s just how it works. And they can do the same thing to Google as well. And so it’s important to understand that these laws exist. But if you’re not doing anything illegal, there’s not really much to worry about at all. So well, why would you worry about data, then why would you worry about where your data is stored? Well, something called Australian privacy principles is important for you to know about. Now, keeping adherence to Australian privacy principles is mandatory. And there are big fines if you don’t, if you’re in financial services, if you’re in healthcare. Or if you’re in a business, I think it’s more than two or $3 million a year in revenue, automatically, you have to be adhering to Australian privacy principles. And what matters there is not what country the data is stored in. But what matters is how you handle the data. And for those places that you store the data or anyone else who handles the data, including Google, if you have data sitting, for example, in a Google spreadsheet, you have to make sure that those are covered in a stringent way as well. So if you are interested in making sure that you are compliant with Australian privacy principles, and you are using Google workspace right now, well, our team actually have a checklist, which we can take you through to ensure that your business is compliant. You didn’t do need to have enterprise licenses to get into compliance with Australian privacy principles. But we have a checklist to take businesses through that. And we’ve taken many, many businesses through the process of getting compliant. So then we have the question of, well, Pete, do I need a VPN? What is the VPN useful for? And should I be using one. And let me tell you to be honest, I don’t personally use a VPN for most of my day to day work. I’m not particularly worried about Google and Facebook tracking my movements. At this point in time, my opinion may change on that in the future. But for now, I enjoy the customization of ads that come to me because they’re well suited to me and I don’t have much of a philosophical problem with my data being collected for that. But if you are concerned about that, then you may choose to use a VPN. If you wanted to watch Netflix on a US Netflix account, then you may choose to use a VPN as well or if you’re concerned about using tools outside Have the Google ecosystem that may not be encrypted, then you may choose to use a VPN as well. And so our recommendation for that is ExpressVPN. We don’t have a discount code for that, or anything, that’s just one of the ones that I’ve personally used, which is quite easy to use. Let’s talk about what your options are. So backup options for Google workspace is what you can use to, let’s say, make sure that you have full control of your data. If you’re worried about Google, maybe losing your data, which is highly, highly, highly unlikely. But if you’re the kind of person who wants to download your data onto a hard drive and put it into a fire, proof, safe, you’re more than welcome to I am not that person. But you are welcome to if you watch option number one is you can use Google’s tool called Google Takeout. And this is basically a full wrap up of your whole account, absolutely everything that’s sitting in your account, and it will put it in zip files, it’ll drop it all into your Google Drive, they will be big if you’ve got lots of data in there. But it puts it in I think, two or four gigabyte chunks, and you get a whole bunch of zip files. And you can download those and put them wherever you want. And that will literally pull absolutely everything that Google can out of your account and hand that to you on a silver platter. And I honestly think that Google do a really good job of this. If you go to xero.com. And you say, hey, I want to get my data out because I want sovereignty of my data. Tough cookies, you’re upset Creek, because there’s no way to cleanly have one export of all your data. And many Software as a Service vendors will actually use this to keep you hooked on their products. So I think Google has done a great job of giving you an option to take out all of your data. And you know, because it’s your data, you own that data. And so they’ve given you a pretty cool avenue to do that, whereas not many other vendors have. If you want to do that with zero, you have to like go and start running reports and things like that. Now we can give them a little bit of slack because it’s not like they’re, you know, spreadsheets that you can just download from Xero. Your data is literally sitting in the database of an accounting platform. But you know, I can understand the business case for them as well if they want to keep you hooked on their product. Now the second option for backing up Google workspace or taking your data out of Google workspace, is using a cloud based backup. And that is a cloud to cloud backup between your workspace account and a third party backup solution. Now we use this for disaster recovery, it’s very unlikely that Google is going to lose any of your data. But it is certainly important that your data is protected. Should you have a maybe a user inside the business, a staff member do some kind of malicious damage, delete things and, you know, purge them or switch off Google vault or something like that. And then from time to time, we see businesses attacked by cryptolocker viruses. And those will actually encrypt all of your data, you can restore it from Google. But it is a very time consuming process to do it manually using either Google vault or using Google Drive to restore things one by one. So we have options for disaster recovery, and Google cloud backup. If you’re interested in that, then please have a chat to our team. And we will be very happy to help out.
Now if you’re a business owner, and you’re a current user of Google workspace, or you’re curious to check out the Google workspace platform, you may be wondering how we can help well it genius is a consulting company. And we help small and medium sized businesses all over the world with their technology to make sure that you have things in the right place. As I shared earlier, we take you through the growth roadmap. No matter where you are in business, we make sure that you’re focusing on the right technology strategy, so that you’re not getting things wrong at the start of your business or wasting time or money on things that you don’t need. And as your business grows, we make sure that you don’t run into any of the pitfalls that are most common with growing businesses. We’ve literally helped 1000s of small business owners grow and scale their businesses. And so we intimately know what is successful, and what is unsuccessful in your tech strategy. And we know a little bit about business strategy as well. But we’re all about helping you grow and be successful. And making sure that the right tech is along the journey with you as you go along. So if you’re already a Google workspace customer, and you’re not working with it genius, you can transfer your licenses into us. What that means is your billing goes through it genius, it does not cost you any more. But you get a whole heap of goodies. We’ve got some classrooms that we’ve got set up with free courses for Google workspace to get your team trained and get you up to speed on all the latest best practices, you get a few free services from our concierge team, you get access to our chat support as well, which is pretty cool. And then when we have promotions for Google workspace and discounts that are not available to the public, you’re able to actually get access to that, if you’re interested in that headlong to it genius.com forward slash transfer. And you can transfer your billing to us fill out a form net super simple, and you get access to all of that. You’ll also get a free consultation from our team. If you are a Google workspace customer or you’re not yet a Google workspace customer and you’re interested in us taking you through our growth roadmap, jump on a call with our team completely complimentary, no obligation to proceed. No hard sells, we’re just going to give you as much value as possible and see, oh, I’ve got Google picking me up in the background. We’re just going to give you as much value as possible in that 20 minutes to see if we might be Good fit to help out your business. If not, that’s totally fine, we may point you in another direction with someone else that we can help. Now, if you’re interested in that, jump along on it genius.com forward slash console, we’ll take you through the growth roadmap. And we’ll help you guys out with anything that we can do to support you. So here we have a picture of our Google Classroom. And this actually shows some of the things that you get access to when you are a customer of it genius. And so if you’re not yet already got access to the classroom, and you are a customer on this call, I just had that same note, and we’ll be happy to make sure you have access. But we got heaps of training and lessons in there for you and your team, basically, on the fundamentals are working remotely, setting up Google workspace correctly. And if you’ve got any new employees, and they’ve just started with you, and maybe they’ve come from Outlook, but you want to train them on how to use Gmail and how to find their way around workspace, this classroom is the perfect place to train them up, make this part of your induction, so you don’t have to bother teaching them how to use workspace. Let us teach your team how to use workspace so you don’t have to do it yourself. If you’re interested headlong to it genius.com. You can see full size transfer if you want to transfer your licenses jump on a console that’s free for absolutely everyone. Or if you have any other questions or you’re not sure where to go, then just jump on the chat and you can chat with our team straightaway they are they’re waiting to take your message and help out as much as possible. And until next time, catch you guys soon. See you later.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
