Google Apps: A tough sell for a medium-sized office
My friend Galen from ShackPrices.com wondered whether the 120-person office where I work now (and he used to) will switch over to Google Apps. Now, I’m a real fan of the Google apps. Gmail would be a huge boost to productivity, I’m sure, as would the real-time collaboration features in Google Docs and Spreadsheets. However, as much as I’d love to break the cycle of outrageously expensive upgrades to Microsoft Office, I don’t have much hope that we’ll be able to move to any online application provider anytime soon, because there are two major objections that I don’t know how to counter: 1) Google keeps all our data; and 2) we would be absolutely dependent on our ISP to maintain a persistent connection (or we’d have to spend more for redundant connections).
The security of our data is the real killer. For my personal work, I’m happy to take the risk of keeping my email and documents on Google’s servers. For my company, though, it’s just irresponsible to chance a lapse in security that could expose our data to the world. I’m well aware that there are numerous ways we’re vulnerable even with our traditional secure network, but that vulnerability is a different thing entirely from voluntarily releasing responsibility for the safety of our company’s most vital asset to a third party. At least we can take appropriate measures to safeguard our intellectual property when it’s in-house. If that data was on Google’s servers, we’d have no ability to assess its safety.
Even if that issue were resolved, we’d have the problem of relying on our local ISP to keep our connection live 100% of the time. Internet outages would just be absolutely unacceptable if we needed to open all our documents through the browser. At least if our net connection goes down now, our staff can still work.
I wish things were different. If I felt better about the security issue, I could definitely see a scenario where most of the company would use Google Apps, and we would only end up buying the MS Office suite for the word processors. In that case, MS Office would be a professional tool, like Photoshop is for graphic artists. However, for the moment, I don’t thing Google Apps is an appropriate choice for an office of our size and with the kind of responsibilities we have to our clients.
How about you? Is your company planning a move to Google Apps? Or have you already? How have you faced these issues?
As you probably know, Google offers a search appliance that can be hosted on your site and searches your intranet. (We’ve got one of those.) If they’re as smart as I think they are, their next step is to offer a similar appliance with Google Apps running on it. This has essentially all the advantages of the current Google Apps, with none of the downsides you’re (justifiably) worried about: your data is all on site, and your ISP is no longer a mission-critical resource.
Your intranet becomes a mission-critical resource—without it, you can’t get to the Google Apps server. But at many-verging-on-most places, your intranet is mission-critical anyway.