Why should I switch my business to Google Apps Premier Edition?
We've listened to many businesses share what's important to them in building and growing a healthy business. What we've found is that businesses are looking for a low-cost, reliable, and secure messaging and collaboration solution that supports their business rather than challenges it. If your business finds itself identifying with some of these challenges, then you might be interested in considering the Google Apps solution for your business.
Take a look at the business advantages of Google Apps that our customers have found out for themselves.
Business challenges:
Cost and resource-draining IT challenges, such as unreliable servers, setup and maintenance expenses, and operating a multi-OS environment
Small email inboxes
Virus attacks, Spam and phishing
Compliance to internal and external policies
Consumption of disk space
Inefficient sharing and collaboration
How Google Apps solves these business challenges:
Dramatically lowers your total cost of ownership with an annual $50 fee for each user account. No hidden maintenance or upgrade expenses - since Google hosts your data, we absorb those costs so that you don't have to.
Boost employee productivity with 25GB of storage per user - your employees can focus on their work rather than on their email quota.
Lean on our 99.9% service level agreement for email to make sure your business is up-and-running.
Share information, don't send it. Real-time document editing cuts down the hassle of sending email attachments and version confusion.
You're actually safer with Google Apps. Since your data is hosted on Google's reliable and redundant data centers, you can stop saving your corporate data on insecure devices, a leading cause of data security problems.
Better message control over what comes in and what goes out of your company with Google Apps' message security and administrative management controls.
Access anywhere, anytime you have an internet connection - whether on your mobile device, laptop, or computer in a multi-OS environment (PC, Mac, Linux).
How does Google Apps work?
Google Apps is a web-based hosted solution, which means you can access Google Apps at anytime, anywhere you have an Internet connection. You might hear this type of technology referred to as "software-as-a-service" or "cloud computing". "Cloud computing" or "software-as-a-service" is a computing model in which IT applications are provided “as a service”, allowing users to access these applications from the Internet ("in the cloud") without needing to maintain the infrastructure that supports them. A simple way to understand the model is how people currently allow companies to run and manage their electricity rather than generating it within their home/office themselves.
With Google Apps, your data and the applications themselves are served from Google's highly secure, scalable, and reliable data centers. Google actually builds its own data centers from scratch, so we're able to have one of the lowest cost-per-server infrastructures in the world; which means that those savings are passed on to our Google Apps customers. Your business is able to offload the infrastructure costs and the effort it takes to maintain an on-premises solution, and focus those savings on more strategic IT initiatives.
And since Google Apps is web-based, your employees can be productive from anywhere, whether they're at their own desk, using a different computer, or on the go with a mobile device.
Why should I use Google Apps instead of an on-premise mail solution like Microsoft® Exchange?
Google launched Google Apps Premier Edition in February 2007, and we have seen an incredible rate of market adoption, including more than 2 million businesses. We are signing up over 3,000 businesses per day on the Google Apps platform. And let's not forget that Google Inc. itself is running its company of 20,000+ employees on Google Apps.
Our customers continue to find that Google Apps Premier Edition is a great alternative of a hosted solution to other alternate on-premise solutions, such as Microsoft® Exchange. Here are some of their reasons why:
Lower cost: Google delivers Google Apps to your business over the Web at a fraction of the cost of installed systems. This means that Google Apps can provide a significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Mailbox redundancy, infrastructure upgrades and infrastructure scaling are all handled behind the scenes by Google, so your business doesn't need to budget time and money for these projects.
Higher quality: Google Apps offers superior security, reliability, and storage space than most organizations can accomplish with an on-premises solution.
Improved usability: Google Apps provides the simple, intuitive interface so that there's minimal training resources involved for end-users.
Leader in Innovation: Google continues to demonstrate its industry leadership in terms of web-based innovation. Driving this platform forward, we have the leading computing platform and have assembled one of the strongest teams of computer scientists in the industry. As a Premier Edition customer you get to experience that innovation first-hand as product enhancements are rolled out on a regular basis.
To help your business make the switch to Google Apps easier, we've enabled a smooth IMAP migration from other platforms to Google Apps; this allows administrators to migrate a handful or a few thousand user mailboxes from an existing mail system to corresponding Google Apps mail accounts. We currently support migration from Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003, Cyrus IMAP Server, Courier-IMAP, and Dovecot via the IMAP protocol. IMAP migration is only available in the Premier Edition. If you currently run one of the supported legacy systems, you can get more details in our IMAP migration overview.
How is Google Apps different from a free @gmail.com account?
Our Google Apps solution for businesses is a packaged product of Google's best messaging and collaboration applications, among which include Gmail™, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Video.
You may have had experience using many of these applications with your user@gmail.com account, and while these applications are similar, we have enhanced them in Google Apps Premier Edition with these critical differences:
1. Google Apps is for your business
When you sign up for Google Apps for your business, you sign up with your own company domain name. So rather than having a user@gmail.com email address, you would create or maintain a company email address such as user@company.com. There is an IT administrative control panel that is built into Google Apps for your business where an IT administrator can manage and control the user accounts across your company domain.
2. Enhanced business-oriented features
Though our product engineers are continually enhancing our Google applications for our free consumers, they are also adding separate, enhanced features to the Google Apps applications that are more oriented for business purposes. Here are just a few things you can do in Google Apps for your business that's not available in our free consumer applications:
Increased Access Controls: Puts your company in control of how your information is shared and communicated outside of your domain.
Gmail: Saves all your corporate information with improved mailing list capabilities, and increased mail thresholds
Google Sites: Understanding that a company intranet and shared documentation is so critical to success, optimized to provide you with the right storage quotas to address your business needs
Google Calendar: Enables conference room and resource sharing, allowing you to schedule office conference rooms or other shared resources in your office.
Google Video: Share internal videos with your company quickly without the complex overhead of many other systems
How secure and private is my data if I switch over to Google Apps?
We understand that employees want to be able to work where they want when they want, to do so they are taking the data with them. Businesses are finding themselves in the position where more and more employees are burning corporate data onto CD/DVD, thumb drives, putting data on their home machines to work on in the evenings and weekends. This has created serous security concerns, because not only do these incidents expose the data to unwanted eyes but often times we lose the data permanently since much of data resides on laptops or desktops.
As such, we take the privacy and security of our Google Apps customer data very seriously. Security is core to our DNA at Google. Our products are designed with security considerations upfront, not as afterthoughts, and our Security team is comprised of some of the world’s leading experts in information, application and network security. Our infrastructure is composed of tens of thousands of identical systems, and we have custom built hardware. Our machines are built on a custom Linux software stack that is hardened and only has the necessary components and services to run the Google requirements, making it easy to uniformly update of all systems. Each single piece of data is replicated in multiple datacenters, so your Google Apps email is replicated to a primary and a backup data center, that are replicated in real time. We also undergo regular security reviews by third parties and SAS 70 audits by an independent third party.
We fully believe in the security of our Google Apps environment that we store our own Google corporate data in the same environment.
Also keep in mind the following:
Google does not claim ownership of your data.
We don't share your data except as strictly outlined in our Privacy Policy.
We keep the data as long as you want.
We delete the data when you ask.
We allow you to take the data out of our system if you decide to switch to a different solution, or if you want to use your data in another application or integrate with other systems.
What type of support options are available to Premier Edition customers?
For general questions or technical assistance, answers are always close by:
Use the Google setup guide for basic instructions about getting started with Google Apps
For tutorials on the messaging and collaboration applications, explore the online training modules
Access Google's extensive knowledge base
To get questions answered by the community of Google Apps administrators from Google's Help Forum
For one-on-one help troubleshooting critical issues, email support is available from the control panel
What about other business needs like customer management, accounting and payroll? Can Google Apps help?
In addition to messaging and collaboration solutions like Gmail and Docs, Google Apps also gives you access to a large variety of additional enterprise applications through the Google Apps Marketplace. These applications can help you with your most common business functions like sales, marketing and finance. Many applications can directly interoperate with Gmail, Calendar, Docs and contacts, helping you to do your work faster and more efficiently.
