How much is keeping users on Archive User licenses costing your business and how much could you save if you used CloudM Archive instead?

Gone but not forgotten.

Even years after an employee has left your business, data compliance regulations such as GDPR and Freedom of Information requests require you to keep their data in some form.

You obviously don’t want to keep these legacy leavers on a full Google license as it is a) expensive and b) it means that if the former employee (or someone else) can access the account, they can use your business’s applications and access sensitive business data.

So, businesses like yours have had to find ways to keep the data (and allow it to be searchable and restorable) without allowing access, and preferably, cheaper.

Historically, they would simply change the user’s full license to a VFE (Vault Former Employee) license. This license SKU was free and archived the data to Vault. Perfect!

What is the issue then?
Well, Google introduced the AU (Archive User) license as a replacement for the VFE, and charged for it (currently ~$60 per user per year). If you had 1000 users on a VFE, this would cost you $60,000…every year (+ any additional offboarded users you apply an AU license too).

Now, this is obviously cheaper and more secure than a full license. But, it’s not exactly pocket change when it’s coming out of your budget (especially when it used to be free).

How does CloudM Archive solve the issue?
The only real legal requirements for data when an employee leaves is to make sure that it is stored somewhere, can easily be restored or retrieved (down to a single file or email) if required, and deleted after a set amount of time. CloudM Archive does all of that for you!

CloudM Archive will automatically send the data of any offboarded user straight to a Google Storage bucket that you own and control, as an optional step in our innovative Offboarding Workflow process. If the step is in the workflow for the user, you do not need to do anything except press a button to trigger the offboarding.

If you need anything back (e.g. you receive a Freedom of Information request), CloudM Archive allows you to see all the data stored in the Storage bucket, indexed by user, so you can quickly find and restore any and all the data you want, and you can restore it to any user within CloudM Manage. All in a matter of minutes.

Oh, and when the time comes when you want are legally obliged to delete the data, CloudM Archive will use data retention policies to automatically purge the data when it’s been stored for a set time. Remember John who left 7 years ago? Of course you don’t. You started 4 years ago. CloudM will remember to delete his data on time so you don’t have to (and so you don’t get hit with a massive data regulation fine too).

And, best of all, you don’t need to pay for a Google license (full or AU) for the user you just archived. You just need to pay for CloudM Archive and the cost of storing your data in your Google Storage buckets, which, even when combined, works out considerably cheaper than an AU license. We’ve done the math and some businesses could be saving up to 75%. Whether that’s Euros, Dollars, Pounds or Pesos, that’s gotta look good on your balance sheet.

The full Google license can even be removed from the user and returned to your license pool as part of the offboarding workflow, ready to be instantly reassigned. You will only ever need to pay for the licenses you actually use.

This all sounds great, right? But, what if it would actually work out cheaper to keep a specific power user’s data on an AU license instead of incurring the cost of storage? Well, we’ve got you covered as well. Simply create a Smart Team of Power / High Volume users and create a bespoke offboarding policy that has the “Apply Google Archived User (AU) license” step included.

CloudM Archive is already helping (and saving) organizations around the world, big and small. If you would like the opportunity to cut the costs and manual effort of keeping former employee data, why not have a quick 15 minute call with one of our expert CloudM Team.

If you manage a Google Workspace domain, you will be very familiar with Organizational Units (OUs) and how they can be used to group users together, making managing a large number of employees significantly easier.

But, one of the disadvantages we found when using OUs was that, inherently, they were very structured and hierarchical – A user could only belong to one OU at a time.

If a user was in the Marketing OU, they would have access to all the shared Marketing resources. But, if you wanted to add the Marketing Team Lead to another “Manager” OU so you could assign a more complex offboarding policy, they would lose access to the Marketing resources. Far from ideal. Far from flexible.

So, we created a way to give you the flexibility to group users together, without breaking your OU structure, whilst assigning bespoke workflows and automations to meet the requirements of their role. We call these group types Smart Teams.

Let’s take a look at a “Manager” Smart Team, as an example, and explore some of the cool things you can do in CloudM:

• You can make the Smart Team dynamic and set it so users that have a tag added to their profile (e.g. Manager) will be added to the group automatically.
• You can set a bespoke Email Signature template for all Managers. For example, you may wish for your Management Team to have their personal LinkedIn accounts displayed instead of the company account.
• You can automatically share access to Management calendars and documents.
• You can set a different offboarding policy that might include additional steps (such as requiring manual confirmation or archiving data to a different Storage bucket).
• You can set a custom Security policy that requires a Manager to use a more complicated, and secure, password to access CloudM (as they are more likely to have admin access to features).

Smart Teams aren’t just reserved for creating custom policies for Management, and you don’t have to make such wholesale changes as shown on the previous example.

In fact, some of the best uses of Smart Teams are when you want to make one small change to a few policies or share resources with a select group of employees.

• You can add a custom footer to the bottom of the email signature of any user that is going to attend an event or convention, so that your customers, partners and suppliers that are attending know you will be there.
• You can share calendars and documents with all your First Aiders, regardless of location or department.
• You can set a quicker, less detailed offboarding policy for all temporary/seasonal staff.

Want to find out more?

Check out our Smart Teams video on YouTube and visit our CloudM website, or book a 15 minute discovery call to speak to one of our brilliant team.

YouTube

Make it easy to send branded email signatures when using a domain alias

ack in the very early days of CloudM, we had a problem!

Even though we were talking to customers and selling as CloudM, our emails (and their signatures) would often come from our parent company, causing unnecessary confusion.

“Who are you?”, we would hear. “I’ve been talking to CloudM”. And, where there is confusion, there’s doubt. “Who am I really dealing with here?” Even if it was never brought up as a reason, we knew it was costing us – both business and reputation.

Well, the easiest way to get around this was to use a domain alias address, allowing our employees to effortlessly switch between their parent company and CloudM email addresses depending on who they were talking to, with all responses sent to the same inbox. Even today, we have centralized staff that need to represent both sides of the company.

With so many companies now having multiple brands and domains under their umbrella, using an alias is getting even more common. Did you know that, in 2020, Unilever NV had 1,181 individual domain names including Ben & Jerry’s and Dove?

But, this brings up another problem – How do you make the email signature represent the brand you are sending the email from?

Introducing Domain Alias Signatures – a new feature for Gmail within our CloudM Email Signature Management module that allows you to set bespoke email signatures that will be displayed depending on which email address the user decides to send the email from.

It could be as simple as the primary email address displaying your company logo, and the domain alias email address displaying the logo of a specific brand.

Or, completely bespoke with different brand colors, fonts, contact details, and social media links, to name a few. And the best thing is that most of this information is added as a variable so that, as soon as a field such as job title is changed in CloudM, it is automatically changed on the email signature, quickly and easily keeping it up to date.

Domain Alias Signatures is just one of many new and exciting feature changes that we have added to our redesigned Email Signature Management module in the last 6 months, joining our brand new Template Gallery and the ability to schedule signatures for the primary domain, with many more updates in the pipeline.

Want to find out more?

Check out our Smart Teams video on YouTube and visit our CloudM website, or book a 15 minute discovery call to speak to one of our brilliant team.

Data security is one of the most prominent issues of the digital age. Constantly evolving and changing, data compliance can be a difficult area to navigate and can be a huge project for any IT department. When a user is offboarded, finding a solution to help you deliver the complex needs surrounding data can be a tricky challenge and if data compliance isn’t withheld to the letter, you could be left with some serious headaches.

In 2021, CloudM created the holy grail of solutions for your offboarded user data. Archive, an industry-first feature, was designed to help businesses by managing compliance, retaining/restoring data as needed, and purging the data when it’s longer needed.

As the footprint for data becomes more and more embedded within our civilization, Archive and other tools like it will become indispensable, helping you to navigate those difficult and sticky data headaches, and keeping you compliant.

So, what’s the best solution for you?

Well, there are three core solutions that will help you stay compliant and efficient, all whilst working to your needs and requirements as a business.

What can we learn from this?

Every business needs something different, and for that, there must be a relatively flexible solution. This is why Archive can work as a solution on its own or as a hybrid solution.

Get in touch with our team of experts for your free demo today.

Get Started

What’s going wrong in your digital workplace and how to fix it.

Having worked with a breadth of different brands reaching from the far corners of education and health to lifestyle and entertainment, we’ve seen a diverse range of digital workplaces and how they’re used.

Whether you’ve been using a digital workplace for a long time, or if you’re new to the Cloud, we see the same mistakes holding workforces back from reaching their fullest potential.

Here are five of the biggest mistakes and the straightforward solutions to fix them.

Email Signatures

Mistake: Whether your business is large or small, a clean and consistent look is essential for professional communication, especially when you’re juggling multiple departments and sub-brands. There’s nothing worse than email signatures with inconsistent branding and fonts, which can be really damaging to your reputation.

Solution: Using an Email Signature Management tool (a popular feature of CloudM) unifies control of signatures across the board while allowing designs to be tailored to specific teams or sub-brands. Automated cohesivity is at your fingertips with just the touch of a button, giving your email signatures a clean, professional, and brand-aligned look with no extra stress.

Shared calendars

Mistake: Not utilizing the full potential of your digital calendars is a tough habit to break, but there are many intuitive features you should embrace if you use a cloud/shared calendar across your business. It would be a huge mistake to not use the brilliant features available to you in order to maximize your efficiency.

Solution: Whether you’re using Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, each productivity suite offers a range of different features so you can get the most out of your time (and your colleague’s time). Whether you want to set working hours so meetings can’t be scheduled on your days off, make appointment slots for people to book, or take some focus time to get on with those looming deadlines, it’s well worth researching the amazing features available to you… Speaking of which, if you want to know more about Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace Calendar, please read our blogs on getting to know their features.

Instant messaging

Mistake: Instant messaging could be something that doesn’t appeal to many businesses because it reminds us of relaxed communication, which might conflict with the professional culture you want in your business, but there are many benefits of embracing instant messaging.

Solution: Instant messaging is a great way to embrace hybrid working whilst still maintaining a good rapport with your colleagues. Instead of piling up a long email chain, or taking up huge chunks of time by hosting meetings, it’s a quick and efficient way to get the answers and solutions you need whilst working. If you’re using Google Workspace, you’ll be familiar with its chat function, Google Chats and Spaces, and its ability to format text the same way you would in a Google Doc. Likewise, you can utilize instant messaging if you’re using Microsoft 365 via Microsoft Teams.

Licenses

Mistake: Along with the licenses for your chosen productivity suite (whether that’s Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace) you’ll be buying licenses left, right, and center for all your other SaaS solutions. This isn’t a bad thing; subscriptions are unavoidable if you want to utilize the true freedom and power of the cloud, but keeping on top of your license count can be tricky and time-consuming.

Solution: Licensing can be one of the leading costs eating up your budget, and managing and maintaining licenses properly can be a huge contributor to saving money. With CloudM, you can automatically manage your most used licenses so the costs don’t build up.

DIY Migrations

Mistake: Many businesses want to make the most of their amazing staff, and so a DIY migration seems like the best opportunity for their IT team to step up to the challenge. But as data migrations require a niche skillset, this can cause spiraling costs, long and drawn-out projects soaking up important resources, and data loss.

Solution: The solution to this is easy. Trust the experts. Many believe experts will end up coming hand in hand with enormous costs, but on the contrary; experts are there to help you save money by keeping the project running smoothly. Having worked with a large breadth of established household names in the past, we’ve saved companies millions.

Step into the future with CloudM

At CloudM, we have an extensive track record of helping our customers with their migrations, digital workplace management, and their data archiving needs. We’re proud to have worked with a huge number of household brands who’ve praised CloudM and our people. We’re ready to help you with any projects you have on the horizon.

Don’t believe us? Ask our customers.

“The time you get back from having a simple user interface you click into compared to our process of how we would restore things is night and day. It used to take a full afternoon to restore something and now it’s literally a few clicks.” – Jamie Tanner, Digital Innovations at Kingston & Sutton Council

The team at CloudM is communicative and supportive. The regular product demonstrations help us to stay up to date with new features and exciting updates to the platform. We feel listened to and valued as customers, and our feedback has gone on to help develop the software.” – Dan Morley, Head of I.T Infrastructure and Service Delivery at Village Hotels

“The customer success team has worked with us to not only better understand the CloudMproduct, but also how we can better utilize Google Workspace. The ongoing support is great. If we’ve had any issues with the product the support team has replied almost immediately, it’s a first-class experience and I believe the best platform for managing your user data. We’ve actually recommended your product to other companies and partners, we have no plans to move away from CloudM, and it really has become an integral part of our role.” – Noberasco