Your Google Workspace is a beast, with Gmail for business email solutions, Google Drive for online storage and office editors, Google Meet for video meetings, and even Google Calendar as a personal assistant! Even better, its implementation and management are incredibly simple; there is no need to install or maintain software updates, patches, or vulnerabilities in applications. Because Google Workspace is built on the cloud, its applications and solutions are always up to date. If it’s any consolation, anything terrible that happens, such as an outage or a bug, will affect more than 3 billion users globally who rely on these services. Google, of course, would rather die than allow this to happen!

Did you know that Google Workspace can deliver more than just communication and collaboration capabilities? For instance, there is an increasing demand for data compliance, particularly email retention; however, this is driven by regulatory and/or internal requirements. Within your company, there may be instances/requirements to keep and maintain ALL workers’ email correspondence! This can be a tacky and dicey requirement! After all, no one wants to feel as if they are being “snooped on.”. But let us take a look at why your business may need this.

Let’s imagine an employee is disgruntled and decides to delete all of his or her emails, deletes a particularly crucial email, and then deletes the email from their trash folder. How would you retrieve such data as an organization, and where would you begin? Would you be aware that the employee has acted in this manner? Is your answer a resounding NO? You might be in luck if your firm can afford the enterprise plan and the administrator remembers to turn Vault on and set it up appropriately. BTW, see how Google Vault works here: https://support.google.com/vault/answer/2462365?hl=en

However, if you’re like the majority of African businesses that use Google Workspace Business plans that lack these functionalities, we’ve got you covered!! Some “hidden tactics and tools” exist to help your company achieve some of these compliance requirements. One of these is Google Vault, a data retention and e-discovery solution that allows you to keep track of what matters and retain, search, and export your organization’s data from select apps within the Google Workspace Business plus, Enterprise Standard, and Enterprise Plus plans.

For organizations that aren’t on the higher Google Workspace plans, you may accomplish this while cutting down on cost on extra Google Vault Standalone licenses by implementing a content compliance rule in the admin panel to automatically backup ALL emails sent and received within your organization. We’ve done this for some of our customers, including Standard Investment Bank and Cytonn, to assist them to meet strict industry regulations while achieving email retention compliance.

You can learn more on how to go about this by attending the Pawa IT Academy which is absolutely FREE. Registration is currently ongoing here: https://pawait.africa/pawa-it-google-cloud-academies/