CloudM 彙整 - 頁5，共9

Are your Google AU license costs adding up? Here’s what to do

Businesses are in a bind. Keeping employee information secure is essential for data protection. But, following the introduction of Google Archive User (AU) licenses, it’s a major expense.

Before this change there was a free option: the Vault Former Employee (VFE) license. Now, AU licenses offer a replacement, but at a cost of between $4-$7 per person, per month.

While this is cheaper than full Google licenses, it’s still an additional charge for ex-employees. In this short guide, we explore alternative options for archiving employee data that keep information safe but don’t cost a fortune.

Why is archiving employee data so important?

In many countries, businesses are legally required to keep staff data – often for years after an employee leaves.

For US employers, the length of time information should be kept depends on the type of data and local rules. Many businesses use seven years as a baseline, because this covers most state and federal rules.

Similarly, rules vary for UK businesses depending on the kind of information kept. The key message is that the length of time you keep data depends on the reason it was collected. Should a previous employee make a claim against your company after leaving, you may need access to their records as evidence.

Proper archiving means you can retrieve data for specific situations such as legal disputes, freedom of information requests, or restoring access should the person become an employee again.

What’s the alternative to Google AU licenses?

You don’t need Google AU licenses to ensure data is stored securely, easily retrievable and restorable, and deleted after a set period. Because CloudM Archive does all this and more.

Our archiving tool has an optional offboarding step to automatically send the leaver’s data straight to your chosen GCP storage bucket, where this information will be deleted after a set time (in line with your data retention policies).

You get full visibility of the data in your storage bucket with CloudM Archive. This comes in handy if you receive a freedom of information request. Instead of spending hours hunting down a single email, you can view storage buckets indexed by user and restore the information in a few clicks.

Best of all, you don’t need to pay for full or AU Google licenses for your team. You just need to pay for CloudM Archive and the cost of holding data in your Google storage buckets. Which, even when combined, works out much cheaper than the AU license fees.

Switching to CloudM Archive: how it works

The transition to CloudM comes in two parts:

1

Reduce what you pay for existing licenses

First, move Google AU license holders to CloudM Archive using our Migrate tool. The CloudM team is on hand to make this transition smooth and easy for you.

2

Control your current spend with automation

Next, set up CloudM Archive so that future leavers have their information stored here instead of incurring new Google AU license fees. With CloudM Archive, leavers data is automatically archived and licenses can be reassigned.

We know you might need to approach data management more flexibly, too. So if you’d rather keep a specific power user’s data on an AU license, you can add a bespoke offboarding step that keeps it there instead.

Combining CloudM Migrate and Archive is a winning formula for cutting license costs. Just ask Paul Young, Head of Collaboration and Communications Digital Solutions at Holcim Group:

“We’ve saved millions of dollars by using CloudM to archive users to a secure storage area. The product has worked since day one. But, if something isn’t working as expected or needs a tweak, CloudM listens and finds a solution with a level of thought and care you don’t always see.”

Read the full case study on how Holcim Group saved on AU license fees and manual admin with CloudM.

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About CloudM
CloudM is an award-winning SaaS company whose humble beginnings in Manchester have grown into a global business in just a few short years.

Our team of tech-driven innovators have designed a SaaS data management platform for you to get the most from your digital workspace. Whether it’s Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or other SaaS applications, CloudM drives your business through a simple, easy-to-use interface, helping you to work smarter, not harder.

By automating time-consuming tasks like IT admin, onboarding & offboarding, archiving and migrations, the CloudM platform takes care of the day-to-day, allowing you to focus on the big picture.

With over 35,000 customers including the likes of Spotify, Netflix and Uber, our all-in-one platform is putting office life on auto-pilot, saving you time, stress and money.

CloudM 2024

CloudM chooses Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital as 2024 charity partner

CloudM has chosen Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital as its charity partner of the year in 2024. As a Manchester-based business, CloudM was keen to support local organisations and help make a difference in its local community.

Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital is the largest children’s hospital in the country, and the work of the Manchester Foundation Trust Charity helps maintain the hospital as one of the best. The hospital provides specialist treatments and care for children from the local community and across the country.

Among the reasons for choosing the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital as its charity of the year, was the inspiring story of local lad, Hughie Higginson and his friend Freddie. Hughie was diagnosed with leukaemia when he was just 10 years old and was treated at the hospital. While he was undergoing treatment, Freddie set out to raise money to support his friend by running 2 kilometres per day for 50 days. Hughie is now cancer-free, and alongside Freddie ‘Hughie & Freddie’s Play Appeal’ has raised a staggering £340,000 for the charity.

It is the support of community and corporate fundraisers that allow the hospital to go beyond the treatment offered on the NHS and improve the experience of the children, and their families, that they treat. Fundraising helps provide state-of-the art equipment, support the very best research and help to deliver exceptional care.

“Over the years CloudM has supported lots of charities, this year we really wanted to support a local organisation. It was an easy choice to support a charity in Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital that really goes above and beyond to ensure that poorly children receive the very best treatment and care possible. We’re really excited to support and raise funds in a real variety of ways.”

CloudM employees will be supporting the charity in a variety of ways, from raising funds and taking part in some of the hospital’s existing fundraising events, to holding our own fundraising efforts. Employees will also be giving up their time to help volunteer within the charity.

When Hughie and Freddie discovered they were the inspiration behind CloudM choosing Royal Manchester’s Children Hospital, they were keen to say “A massive thank you, it will help so many patients and families, thank you so much!”

“We are so very grateful for CloudM colleagues choosing to support Manchester Foundation Trust Charity as their new Charity of the Year, raising funds for Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital,” said Jack Bright, Relationship Manager at Manchester NHS Foundation Trust Charity. “We can’t wait to meet more of the CloudM team as they get stuck in with their fundraising, which will make a difference to thousands of patients and their families who need our hospital each and every year. Welcome to our family of fantastic supporters and we look forward to working with you!”

We’ll provide regular updates on activities and our fundraising events throughout the year, and if any customers or partners would like to get involved, please reach out to your account manager.

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About CloudM
CloudM is an award-winning SaaS company whose humble beginnings in Manchester have grown into a global business in just a few short years.

Our team of tech-driven innovators have designed a SaaS data management platform for you to get the most from your digital workspace. Whether it’s Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or other SaaS applications, CloudM drives your business through a simple, easy-to-use interface, helping you to work smarter, not harder.

By automating time-consuming tasks like IT admin, onboarding & offboarding, archiving and migrations, the CloudM platform takes care of the day-to-day, allowing you to focus on the big picture.

With over 35,000 customers including the likes of Spotify, Netflix and Uber, our all-in-one platform is putting office life on auto-pilot, saving you time, stress and money.

CloudM 2024

Vault doesn’t cut it: why you need a backup solution for Google Workspace

For organizations looking for an affordable, scalable productivity suite, Google Workspace is a great option. Designed with security in mind, it also has several features that promise to keep your organization’s most valuable asset – your data – safe.

Your data is under constant threat – and the consequences can be costly

The safety of your data is under attack from many directions: cybercriminals as well as disgruntled users, accidental human error, programmatic errors and more pose a threat. Cyberattacks especially are an ever growing challenge: incidents have doubled in some sectors due to the advances in AI enabling criminals to conduct increasingly sophisticated attacks.

Data loss often comes with severe consequences for your business. The time and effort required to recover from the event and get critical operations running safely again can be significant. Being able to demonstrate business continuity in the event of a cyberattack is a legal requirement of regulations such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the upcoming NIS 2 directive, and fines for non-compliance are hefty. Lastly, your reputation is on the line, too, especially when it is found that data security protection was lacking.

Google’s protection is not enough

Google’s safety mechanisms include end-to-end encryption and two factor authentication. However, Google’s built-in backup and recovery solution is insufficient, leaving you and your data at risk. There are two main reasons for this:

Google’s built-in backup functionality provides only temporary and limited protection

Google constantly backs up your data to meet their service level agreements (SLA) in the event of a major service outage on their part. Your data is “sharded” (partitioned horizontally) and split between multiple regions and data centers so that in the event of a catastrophic failure or cyber attack on a single data center, your “live” data will still be available to you when you open up Google Workspace.

However, there are no automatic backups beyond 25 days, and only limited protection against accidental deletion and malicious users.

Google Vault is not a backup solution

Some organizations use Google Vault, a protective layer to provide data retention and eDiscovery for compliance purposes, to backup their data, however Vault is not designed as a backup tool. It only stores the latest versions of your data and is not designed for recovery.

Read how Google themselves openly admit that Vault is not a backup tool.

In fact, you are responsible if your data is lost or changed in many common circumstances such as:

A user has modified content and you need to restore it back to a previous state.
A malicious user has been able to modify and delete data because you have given them access to it through sharing and delegation policies.
An admin has incorrectly set a policy or process (such as a Vault retention policy) leading to unwanted changes to your data such as pre-emptive deletion

Google Workspace and Google Vault lack basic backup functionality

Further limitations that disqualify Google Workspace and Google Vault as effective backup and recovery methods include:

No mass restoration process – Google does not provide an easy, direct and effective method of restoring data in bulk.
Data restored may not be in the format required – For example, Google Vault will only allow you to restore emails in MBOX format with no label preservation.
Limited time and no version control when restoring from Google Workspace Trash – Whilst you can retrieve deleted items from Trash, you only have a limited amount of time to do so (25 – 30 days) before it is permanently deleted. You will only be able to restore the latest version of the file or email with no granular version control.

How can you protect your data from the consequences of data loss?

In summary, relying on Google and Google Vault for backup and recovery exposes your organization to significant risk from data loss. Noncompliance, reputational damage and ultimately the cost of restoring your data and recovering from the loss further strengthen the case for implementing a robust backup and recovery solution.

CloudM Backup a simple yet powerful backup and recovery solution for Google Workspace that protects your data against accidental deletion and malicious users whilst providing quick and easy mass restoration should data loss occur.

Find out how CloudM backup can protect your organisation.

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About CloudM
CloudM is an award-winning SaaS company whose humble beginnings in Manchester have grown into a global business in just a few short years.

Our team of tech-driven innovators have designed a SaaS data management platform for you to get the most from your digital workspace. Whether it’s Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or other SaaS applications, CloudM drives your business through a simple, easy-to-use interface, helping you to work smarter, not harder.

By automating time-consuming tasks like IT admin, onboarding & offboarding, archiving and migrations, the CloudM platform takes care of the day-to-day, allowing you to focus on the big picture.

With over 35,000 customers including the likes of Spotify, Netflix and Uber, our all-in-one platform is putting office life on auto-pilot, saving you time, stress and money.

CloudM 2024

How a UK retail giant saved a LOT of time and money with CloudM

A UK based high street retail giant with over 500 stores across the UK, Europe, Asia and the Middle East and a global online presence, employing nearly 50,000 staff worldwide. With over a century and a half of retail experience, they cater for 5 million+ active customers globally in 70 countries, specializing in Clothing, Footwear, Accessories and Home products.
Even after 150 years, this retailer actively researches and invests in the latest technologies, including eCommerce, digital transformation and security, to keep their processes moving forward and continue to offer greater value to their customers.

The Issue

The retailer wanted to cut down license cost as their VFE licenses were due to be renewed as costly Google AU licenses, whilst also retaining the data in accordance to data regulation laws.

Offboarding was also taking them too long with an average of 1000 offboarding processes a month eating up the valuable time of their IT team. They also wanted to be able to standardize the process across all departments to speed up offboardings and avoid costly human error.

The Process

The retailer had spoken to us several years previously about our user management software before ultimately, and unsuccessfully, choosing a competitor. Upon reengaging with CloudM, they were pleasantly surprised by not only the growth and maturity of the product modules and features, but the attentive, professional and knowledgeable service they received throughout.

Being a company of their size, they wanted to make sure that CloudM would be a good fit for them long term. Our Sales Architects quickly allayed any fears that they had with a series of product demos with senior members from their IT team, explaining how CloudM Automate and CloudM Archive modules would combine to deliver a seamless process for their administrators, as well as scoping out potential issues.

As soon as the customer started to use CloudM, our Customer Success Team was on hand to guide them through the initial stages, helping them to set up their roles, groups and offboarding policies and archive storage buckets.

Claire Robinson, Customer Success Manager at CloudM, explained “The enablement process is crucial with every customer. Helping them start on the right track means that they can get the very best out of CloudM as quickly as possible. We want our customers to succeed so we are always on hand to help, listen and resolve, whether it’s day one or year 10 of their journey with us”.

It’s this cycle of communication and collaboration that encouraged the retail giant to suggest several software improvements that would make their experience easier. This feedback has helped us to develop and add several new features to the suite, benefiting all of our CloudM Automate and Archive customers. We also looked for new and innovative ways to use our current features to solve some of these issues.

The Result

As far as returns on investment go, few are as quick and evident as the saving the retailer made by simply using CloudM Archive and Google Cloud Storage as an alternative to transitioning to Google Archive User (AU) licenses.

“CloudM pay for themselves – We saved so much in license costs and the amount of time and resource needed to do really quite simple tasks.”

With almost 3000 free VFE accounts due to transition to paid AU licenses at their next renewal, the business was looking at an eye watering bill of nearly $350,000 over the next two years alone. CloudM helped to eliminate that need with CloudM Archive, allowing them to keep all their user data, securely and totally compliant, at a fraction of the cost. CloudM Archive has been proven to save customers as much as 75% compared to renewing to AU licenses.

But ROI shouldn’t be counted in purely financial terms alone. Time can be equally as valuable as money. Our offboarding features allowed the retailer’s IT team to easily build bespoke workflows, customizable for each Organizational Unit and Smart Team, so the entire offboarding process is automated and triggered with one button. As they routinely offboarded around 1000 users a month, we worked out that CloudM would save them an incredible 21 full days on manual offboarding tasks…every single month. Even better, with CloudM Automate, they no longer have to rely on GAM scripts or continually accessing the Google Admin Console.

Now, their IT teams can get on with the important tasks, assured that we are taking good care of the monotonous offboarding work in the background.

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About CloudM
CloudM is an award-winning SaaS company whose humble beginnings in Manchester have grown into a global business in just a few short years.

Our team of tech-driven innovators have designed a SaaS data management platform for you to get the most from your digital workspace. Whether it’s Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or other SaaS applications, CloudM drives your business through a simple, easy-to-use interface, helping you to work smarter, not harder.

By automating time-consuming tasks like IT admin, onboarding & offboarding, archiving and migrations, the CloudM platform takes care of the day-to-day, allowing you to focus on the big picture.

With over 35,000 customers including the likes of Spotify, Netflix and Uber, our all-in-one platform is putting office life on auto-pilot, saving you time, stress and money.

CloudM 2023

Setting your office to autopilot

How do you want your IT team to spend their valuable time?

Do you want them to prioritize the big ticket, business critical projects such as keeping your business secure and optimizing your internal systems, continuing to add value to your company?

Or do you want them to spend hour after hour (after hour) responding to the backlog of little time sync tasks that stack up through the day? The “can you add my new job title to my email?” or the “John’s just joined but he can’t access…”

With CloudM Automate, you can put thousands of tasks a year on autopilot, saving days worth of work hours and allowing your team to concentrate on the important, interesting challenges keeping your organization moving forward.

Onboarding

When a new employee joins the business, or an employee moves to a new role, we want them to hit the ground running. Nothing stalls this enthusiasm more than having to wait for access to the resources that they need.

With CloudM Automate, you can make sure that they have access to all the shared documents, drives and calendars required for their role and department, on day one. All you have to do is make sure they are added to the correct dynamic user group.

You don’t need to go into each resource that they need and share it with the new starter. A 30 minute slog is now down to 2 minutes, at most!

Offboarding

When it comes time to say goodbye to an employee, a lot of individual tasks land in your IT team’s inbox. For example, you need to secure the user’s account (including changing passwords), transfer the ownership of Docs, Sites, Calendars and Groups, migrate emails, and claim back licenses. Even a simple manual offboarding process can take up roughly 30 minutes of your IT team’s valuable time.

CloudM Automate allows you to craft bespoke offboarding workflows of up to 30 individual tasks, automatically assigned to users based on group membership, all triggered with the press of a single button. No more delays, no more errors, no more manual tasks.

Integrations

CloudM Automate plays well with a host of other SaaS applications including Slack, Box, Dropbox, Bamboo HR and ADP, giving you even more ways to put menial tasks on autopilot.

The first way we do this is to allow you to secure and delete SaaS licenses assigned to a leaver as a simple, single step in your offboarding workflows. This is great for making sure that leavers no longer have access to your company data, but will also save you money on used SaaS licenses.

Then, secondly, we have integrations that allow you to make changes to a user’s profile in one SaaS application and have them automatically sync to CloudM Automate. Even better, these changes can automatically trigger onboarding and offboarding workflows, and email signature changes.

Email Signature Management

Any recently promoted or hired employee needs to update their email signature, but instead of hassling the IT department with a ticket, what if it was all done automatically? We use “variable” labels in our templates that take the latest synced information from a user’s CloudM profile or your organization profile.

In fact, with the integrations mentioned in the section above, your HR team can even change the details directly in Bamboo HR or ADP (as they would have to do normally), with the changes syncing over to CloudM Automate, and triggering changes to the user’s email signature. With ZERO interaction from your IT team required.

Also, our role permissions means you can give the right people the right access to our platform. IT admins can give a Marketing or HR team the permissions to create and assign email signatures, without allowing access to any other administrative features, such as onboarding, offboarding and archive.

Streamline your business with CloudM Automate, the award-winning platform that gives you the ability to automate your office, saving you time, stress and money.

Contact us today and discover for yourself just how valuable office automation can be.

About Version 2 Digital

Version 2 Digital is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company distributes a wide range of IT products across various areas including cyber security, cloud, data protection, end points, infrastructures, system monitoring, storage, networking, business productivity and communication products.

Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, different vertical industries, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.

About CloudM
CloudM is an award-winning SaaS company whose humble beginnings in Manchester have grown into a global business in just a few short years.

Our team of tech-driven innovators have designed a SaaS data management platform for you to get the most from your digital workspace. Whether it’s Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or other SaaS applications, CloudM drives your business through a simple, easy-to-use interface, helping you to work smarter, not harder.

By automating time-consuming tasks like IT admin, onboarding & offboarding, archiving and migrations, the CloudM platform takes care of the day-to-day, allowing you to focus on the big picture.

With over 35,000 customers including the likes of Spotify, Netflix and Uber, our all-in-one platform is putting office life on auto-pilot, saving you time, stress and money.

CloudM 2023