If you're a business owner or IT executive in the healthcare, legal, or finance industries, it's a good idea for you to listen up for this. If you're using Google workspace and have not yet considered switching to Google Enterprise, this video is going to cover all the reasons why you might want to consider making the switch.
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Transcription:
If you're a business owner or IT executive in the healthcare, legal or finance industries, well, it's a good idea for you to listen up for this. If you're using Google workspace and have not yet considered switching to Google Enterprise, this video is going to cover all the reasons why you might want to consider making the switch. Now, I need to preface any advice in this video, that I'm not a lawyer. And it's important for you to check the regulatory requirements in the country of your residence at the moment, and make sure that anything I share here is applied to your particular locale. Now, I'm going to give examples from Australia and using Australian law and the basics that I know but I can't give any advice here. This is just general information about the products and about my experience in business. So make sure you check this off with your lawyer or anyone else that you usually go to to get advice on these issues. Now, for many businesses that are using Google workspace and want to work in a more efficient, more productive, more effective way of working, businesses will often switch to Google workspace. And we have worked with literally 1000s of businesses all over the world, helping them get their technology, right so that teams can be productive. Now, from time to time, we come across a business in particular industries, they're either a healthcare provider, they're working in finance, or perhaps a legal or consulting firm. And these businesses have an extra layer of regulation that other small and medium-sized businesses would not normally have.
Now in Australia, we have something called Australian Privacy Principles, which is an extension of our Privacy Act. And it effectively regulates the way that the personal information of your consumers is actually handled inside your business. And there's a stringent set of guidelines to ensure that the personal information of those that you work with is well protected. Now, imagine you're a financial advisor, and you have somebody sending you their bank statements, or their taxation information, or their credit card details, or even their date of birth. In Australia, it's actually called a tax file number, but other countries call it social security. And so you have that information being handled inside a business. If you're a lawyer, you may have sensitive details about particular cases, again, personal information, date of birth, you know, perhaps concealed information that will usually only be shown in a court. And if you're in the healthcare space, well, you've got somebody's most intimate information in that healthcare records. Now, all of these pieces of information need to be stored and protected properly, which is why there are privacy laws in each country. And many businesses, even small businesses. And you know, I'd say an example might be like a psychology practice that has, you know, has a hold of this information. You know, even if you're a small business, some, some businesses don't actually go to the trouble of protecting things.
If you're a small law firm, if you're a small accounting firm, if you're a small financial advisory, perhaps you're in the earliest stages of business, you've got less than 10 employees, you know, but quite often, not all the boxes are ticked in terms of making sure that privacy is taken care of. Now, in Australia, any business with more than $2 million, a year of revenue actually needs to comply with the Australian Privacy Principles. So any business that is growing into the mid market space, starting to hire more and more employees go to a bigger business actually needs to adhere to these rules. And the penalties for not getting these right mean that you might actually end up potentially fined or even in prison. Yes, they are that serious, if there are major breaches of the privacy principles and privacy laws. So it's really important to make sure that you have strict privacy controls on the personal information of your customers and consumers that you're handling. If you were to not take care of this and not take it seriously, it's a little bit like driving down the highway without a seatbelt on. For the most part, you're probably going to be okay, but the one day that you have an accident, well, you're going to run into a lot of trouble. So let's start sharing some of the principles and why it's important for you to make sure that you have good privacy controls on your data, and how something like G Suite Enterprise can actually help with that. Now, the Australian Privacy Principles outline the ways that you should protect data. And if you think about, you know, what are the most common ways that data is shared inside a business? Well, unfortunately, some team members may share customer information on chat is potentially shared in, you know, plain text information just sitting in documents, your team may be on, you know, email and sending emails between each other with customer information, or maybe forwarding a customer email to another colleague, which may include customer information on there. And so you can see, it's obviously it's pretty easy for leaks to start to happen. If you imagine a staff member who's you know, catching the bus home or train, and they don't have a passcode on their phone, and they accidentally leave that on their on their mode of transport, then someone could actually jump straight into their work, email and potentially see customer information. And that is a clear breach of the privacy principles because you need to make sure that you've made a solid effort to actually protect the information of your customers and of your consumers. So what are some of the things that you need to make sure you have in place for this protection? Well, number one is making sure that you have secured the endpoints. I just talked about mobile phones and you know Typically leaving a laptop or a phone or a device or an iPad, on a train or on a bus, you want to make sure that those endpoints are secured. And what that means is enforcing a policy of having passcodes on individual devices so that no one can just leave their phone without a passcode. And, of course, if you've got 30, or 40, staff, it's going to be hard to run around to every single person and check whether or not they actually have a passcode set up on their phone. And so that's why we set a policy inside of Google workspace, which is automatically applied, the first time that they sign into their work account. Next up is to make sure that you have a disaster recovery plan. And that is, what's your recovery plan. If something goes wrong with your data inside your organization, if you have some kind of data loss event, are you prepared for that? Now, for most businesses, when they're using the cloud, they just kind of trust that it's always gonna be there. And you're pretty safe to do that. In all honesty, it's very unlikely that using even Dropbox or Microsoft, of course, Google workspace and google drive to store your data, it's so unlikely that there's going to be any data loss event that might happen there, which is on account or you know, the fault of Google. But what's more likely to happen is something that involves human intervention. Maybe you have a rogue employee who's left the business and has decided to delete some things on the way out, or someone is cleaning up their files in their Google Drive. And by accident, they delete the wrong folder. And then 30 days later, it's gone from trash, and they have a bit of an Oopsy daisy moment that that data has now gone missing. Now that can run serious, serious, serious problems into a business such as a legal or consulting business, or accounting or finance business where you have to keep records for a certain amount of time. Imagine losing someone's personal information in a healthcare, business or potentially losing medical records. So ensuring that you have a disaster recovery plan means that you have copies of your data outside the application that you're using, are using something like a third party backup service for Google workspace is something to handle this, we have options available for that, if you're an existing workspace subscriber Australian Privacy Principles covers all business data, it doesn't just cover your customers personal information, which means that any app that you're using any service that you're using, is important that you have all of the data secured, and safe and protected from anyone getting their hands on it, but also protected from staff leaking that information accidentally, either internally, or externally as well. So you want to make sure you have like the right correct permissions set up for your Google Drive very, very basic things. But making sure only the right team members can see certain folders or see certain client information. The other thing to be mindful of is if you're using third party applications, like maybe slack, and that has a limit on the amount of service that is stored in there and the amount of history that is stored. Well, you may consider not paying for that, as most small businesses want to keep their expenses down. But you actually lose access to some of your data by using an application like that in free mode. And so when many businesses choose to use multiple different apps, our recommendation is to actually consolidate and simplify. And so if you're interested in learning about why using Slack is probably not a great idea for business, you can jump on to our video and choose to instead use Google chat over slack. Next up, one of the principles of the Australian laws around privacy is the mandatory reporting of breaches, which means that if you detect a breach inside your business, you actually have to report those breaches. And in those cases, it's very important that you have a full log of everything that's happened in business, no one wants to get to a stage where you have an incident or a claim or a legal case. And you've got to try and trawl through your data and actually find out what happened, particularly if there is data missing, because that's the kind of thing that can land you in hot water with the law if you've mishandled somebody's personal information. And one of the great features of G Suite Enterprise is being able to use the Google Vault and vault allows you to store all of your information safely and securely. Any email that comes into your business or goes out of the business, and even documents and files has a carbon copy stored inside Google Vault. And that carbon copy means that anytime there is a communication, you've got a safe copy of it, even if someone deletes it from the individual mailbox. So what are some of the features of workspace enterprise, which allow you to tackle and manage these different areas of business while securing endpoints I already shared that you can set a policy for everyone to ensure that there are the correct levels of passcodes and authentication on each device that accesses your business data, which will help you to ensure that they are protected. Next, having a third party backup application service for a disaster recovery plan is going to ensure that your data is covered something like data loss prevention, and what that actually means is there will be a process where anytime one of your team members puts a plain text piece of critical information into an email that email will actually be automatically quarantined by security rules. And this is a great feature just for enterprise accounts which means that anytime someone accident He puts personal information in an email, it can't actually leave the business, even if your staff were to make the mistake. There's many more features of workspace enterprise, which make this setup for your business and absolute sense. And if you're interested in getting some help with that, then you can check out the links below. At the end of the day, whether it was malicious damage by your staff who shared information on purpose or willingly. Or if it was a complete accident, someone forwarded an email and I didn't mean to, the lawyer is going to look at that no different, you are responsible as the business owner for protecting the information of your customers inside your business. And it means that you need to make sure you have made the commercial decision to protect your business.
Now, the way I like to think about this is if you stood up in court, and you've got to protect and defend the decisions that you made in your business, ask yourself, would I rather have paid an extra couple of $1,000 to have this taken care of and have the policies in place? So you have the defensibility? Of here are the steps that we took? Or are you willing to say no, you know what, we just didn't really think about that one, the real cost of making sure you get this done right is not the small investment you make now in getting your implementation of workspace correct. It's what you have to pay potentially in the future if you don't get it right. If you're interested in an audit of your current workspace account, jump on the link down below and our team will be very happy to help. If you are someone who is interested in learning more about all there is to do with Workspace getting more out of your investment. Well check out our other videos on our channel. And no matter what stage of business you're at right now. We have information on helping you build more productive and scalable and successful businesses. We are all about the intersection of technology and business and we want to help you to build better businesses with Cloud tech. Until next time, see you.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
