It's time to stop using your personal Gmail Account for business. There's a risk of losing critical business data (without recovery). Also, using a Gmail account might also hurt how your clients see you professionally (and that's definitely a no-no!). If you want to cement yourself as a professional organization… safe, secure and on-brand email is where you should start.
Contact our team to learn more about G Suite or organise a Guided Trial.
Why you shouldn't be using a Gmail account for your business data.
From time to time customers come along and say, “I'm already on Google for my business”. We have to kind of inquire and ask, “Well, are you using your domain name? Are you paying for Google apps or a G Suite account?” And the customer says, “No, I just signed up at Gmail. Doesn't everyone get it for free?” And then we realise that the customer has just signed up for a consumer personal Gmail account. That Gmail account is a Gmail account for business.
There are a few ways of bringing your business account into a personal Gmail account. What businesses do sometimes is they will forward their email in or they'll set up like a retrieval system so it comes into Gmail and then goes back out of Gmail as well. But that's not quite using a business Google account. You're still effectively using the Gmail account. And the easiest way to tell if you're using G Suite is to look at your login.
When you sign in at Gmail.com and you're just using a Gmail account, then you're using the basic consumer version. If you're signing in with your business domain name, then that means you're on G Suite, which is the business version of Google.
Risk of using personal Gmail account for business
Gmail started as a personal consumer service and it's free. Google support that with advertising. Google doesn't really do any nasty stuff with your data, but they do certainly make use of that data for advertising and for gaining analytics on their users so they can improve the product and improve their marketing as well.
Not much support
Because there are literally over two billion Gmail accounts, there's not really much of a support line to go to. You do have email support, but because there are just so many accounts, it's next to impossible for google to provide any level of engaged support for that product.
If anything goes wrong with your Gmail account, there's no one to call if something goes wrong. Now, from time to time, we are able to retrieve Gmail accounts if there is a problem. But for the most part, once a Gmail account is gone, then it's gone.
And yeah, sure, there are some backup solutions, but I probably wouldn't want to trust that Gmail account, particularly if you've got email logins and sign-ins for your business, or using that Gmail account as your login.
You don’t look professional
The other advantage of working with a business G Suite account instead of using a Gmail account is it looks more professional. If you're running a business, you really should be using G Suite for your data.
You don’t have control over your team
You don't really have control over what other people are doing when you use a regular Gmail account for business. On G Suite, you have control. You can assign accounts. You can add or remove different people from the G Suite account using the admin panel. And so all access to your business data is controlled by you. What that means is that you've got everything secured and locked down, so if you're sharing files, it's all safe within your business. And if you're using an advanced feature like team shared drives, that lets you do even cooler things, like let your staff put files into a folder but not delete files from a folder. It lets you lock down all kinds of really cool things within the Google account
Takeaway
Just to wrap it off, once you're on a G Suite account, you also get access to support. Now, if you signed up directly with Google, you get access to Google support. If you've signed up with someone like us at IT Genius, you get access to premium support. And what that means is as long as you have access to your domain name, you always have access to your Google account.
It's very, very rare that Google would shut down an account or something gets switched off. The only time someone loses access to their G Suite account is typically when you forget to pay the bill. But if something does happen and for whatever reason Google shuts down your account or an employee locks you out, or someone has tried to hack into the account and steal access to your data, as long as you are in control of your business domain name, you can work with a partner like us to help get access to your account.
Google has guides and wizards, and step by step guides on getting G Suite implemented, but they missteps and to be honest, if you're a business owner, it is not a good use of your time to be faffing about with trying to set up G Suite yourself. It's better to delegate it to someone who's done it a million times and knows all the processes and can also support you through the process of answering any questions. So, if you're interested in that, head along to our website, ITGenius.com, and our team will be very happy to help you out. Doesn't matter where you are in the world, we can help with your Google account and if you need it, then be sure to get in touch.
