The Ten Benefits of Using Google Team Drive

What is Google Team Drive?

Google Team Drives is a revolutionary user-centric enterprise storage management system designed with enterprise team collaboration patterns in mind. Digital technologies are continuously changing the way people work today. Innovation is in Google’s DNA, and by being focused on core business processes, the company has put over a thousand hours of the user experience research engineering into this. Imagine that there are nearly 800 million monthly active users of Drive with trillions of files stored on Google Drive, representing knowledge repository of enterprises.

Having invested precious engineering years in developing the capabilities of intelligent tools, advanced collaboration technologies, machine-learning and adaptive robotics, along with compliance and control, Google is quickly changing the tempo of the workflow on our planet.

What are the Google Team Drive Benefits for Organizations?

The topmost benefit of the Google Team Drive feature is the ability for teams to share files and keep them safe even when an employee/team member leaves the organization. The uniqueness of Team Drive is that once you create a Team Drive, no one is the sole owner of the Drive. It means that the Google Drive and its contents, and the documents in the Drive are now owned by the team.

1. Google Team Drives Ensure Combination of Enterprise Predictability with Innovations in Team Collaboration Patterns

Real-time changes and challenges may deceptively force leaders to make a false choice: either adopt revolutionary changes to enable significant competitive advantages or choose predictability, comfort, stability, and control to keep complex organizations running, and cope with the risk of being left behind as the competition is not standing idly.

However, for large enterprises, predictability is critical and Google Team Drive delivers to the enterprise-grade companies and G Suite administrators the guardrails and control they need to meet the compliance obligations, prevent data breaches, and ensure business processes integrity and continuity with best-in-class user experiences in the cloud environment.

Google Team Drive is a technology intelligently adapted to dramatic changes, and corporate managers and team drive users can now effectively direct and secure terabytes of data.  Expectations arise from legacy file-share and content management habits, and IT admins must retain control over corporate data. As G Suite admins are core decision makers for technology adoption, they might consider whether the solution will allow the fulfillment of multiple compliance obligations, to protect sensitive data against breaches and leaks, to control confidential information sharing, etc.

Migrating from the existing on-prem storage, cloud or even G Suite into Team Drive in the cloud may seem complex, uncertain and cyber risk-bearing, meaning IT professionals might hesitate and think whether the migration venture is worth the effort or instead play it safe with the on-premise or legacy systems. A fly in the ointment may appear when end-users find all their content in the wrong place, while a G Suite admin had limited time to map out permissions properly, or people can’t find the right documents in the tons of content produced in the previous 30 years.

Google invested in migration capabilities that solve the problems of legacy file-share and content management habits; admin control retention over data and Team Drives content; seamless migration to Team Drives, continuity and integrity of enterprise business processes, and cyber risk management tools.

2. Google Team Drive is Ideal for Contemporary Teamwork Patterns

Google Team Drives is an ideal product for teamwork. However, most cloud storage solutions were not architected for team deployment. So, enterprise team members were exasperated with discovering, organizing their content, and resolving access problems. Repeated collaboration requests like “I can’t find something; can you send me a link?” prove the traditional tools are ineffective.  In March 2017, Google introduced Team Drives, a familiar, simple and obvious technology built for enterprise teams, containing content and access management tools that make IT admins happy. Team Drive allows searching, storing and gaining access to any piece of content, anywhere and on any device.

Google rewrote the entire computation, content sharing model, and ownership models – from the end-user interface layer all the way down to the storage system, including the API, etc. Due to this super-shared content approach, Google made Team Drives transparent, predictable and understandable for large teams in enterprise-grade companies. Everything inside the Team Drive is accessible to everyone, and new team members automatically see the right content.

3. Google Team Drive Follows Organizational Best Practices and Facilitates Onboarding

It’s beneficial for onboarding new staff and becomes effective in their new roles as often, enterprise leaders provision them to various collaboration systems and groups. New team members get access to content automatically and immediately as Team Drive appears in the left-hand navigation. All pieces of content (objects, files, and folders) stay put and seamlessly flow through, even as team members change over time, and users don’t overshare or under share the content.

4. With Google Team Drives Permissions are Easy to Understand and Manage

Google enables IT and G Suite admins to grant different user roles.

• Added Access is the essential role to provision to your users for effective, safe and comfortable collaboration, even for users hesitant to adopt new technology.

• G Suite Administrator can monitor and manage Team Drives in their domain. Team Drives grant users the capability to perform the appropriate actions. An IT admin can adjust the security settings, edit membership behind the scenes, adding, removing users and changing their roles in the G Suite Admin Console. Admins can also see events in the Drive audit log, in addition, there is a capability to restore deleted content and recover other Team Drives.

Google provides extensive aids for Team Drives deployment, including Change Management Guide, in-product training, and G Suite Learning Center.

Team Drives creates a great balance between controls, capabilities and sophisticated role models within the enterprise. You can either create Team Drives right away or take a cautious approach and map out your corporate information on the domain before rolling it out to employees.

5. G Suite Admin is Capable of Maintaining G Suite Control

Google is focused on building admin’s controls with a view for admins to be confident while moving the enterprise data from the on-premises legacy system into Team Drive. Team Drive is the cloud environment that will safeguard data safe against security breaches, and enables companies to fulfill compliance obligations.

Google engages IT professionals to prevent cloud security breaches, not to report or remediate them. Deploying Team Drives technology enterprise professionals are capable of scanning, identifying and securing data leak threats.

6. Google Team Drive Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

This new feature allows a G Suite admin to identify critical content that should not be shared outside of your company domain, regardless of the industry or geography you are in. This sensitive content can include HR team files on social security numbers, employee’s personal data, accounts receivable or order management team information containing credit card numbers. The IT admin’s responsibility is to ensure this data doesn’t get shared outside of the organization inadvertently or purposefully. Google Team Drives empowers admins to scan, identify and proactively prevent critical content from leaking as opposite to the reporting data leaks and breaches. 

7. Manage Google Team Drives and Ensure Content Governance Capabilities

Managing with Google Team Drives content kept and deleted frequently brings a headache for G Suite administrators, and such mistakes can turn into expensive legal or compliance volumes.

Large companies run across many compliance burdens, being subject to strict rules in various geographies and you as the G Suite admin, in conjunction with your legal team, want to ensure 100% of that content gets deleted at 7 years and a day. Google provides tools to do that.

Enterprise-grade companies get sued regularly, and in a lawsuit, it’s vital to make sure no documents are destroyed or guarantee that any matching content can’t get deleted from the system. This is where Vault for Drive benefits get handy: it has advanced retention, data loss and deletion controls for all the content stored in Team Drives. The G Suite admin can easily set up rules by department (legal, HR, finance) to address legal and compliance requirements.

Google, being subject to several audited compliance certifications, ensures that pieces of content are off Google’s server and this void data will never come back to life.

8. Content Migration to Team Drives Made Seamless and Easy

Let’s talk on Google Team Drive Migration. Migrating to Team Drives often seems a challenging and critical endeavor, and error-prone migrations may cause significant business disruption. Any G Suite admin aspires to avoid cloud migration mistakes and ensure all projects are delivered successfully. The admins need not only to move files themselves and extract them out of legacy content management systems, but also correctly map the permissions, provide access to content to all team members and ensure the content doesn’t inadvertently get opened too broadly outside.

Another reason to be anxious is the issue of legacy data, whereas admins are drowning in the data accumulated over the years in pre-existing systems. Google Team Drives technology, architected and designed for the enterprise, provides well-tested solutions to smoothly, simply and quickly migrate content to G Suite. As a G Suite administrator, you can effectively manage Team Drives within your company in cases when you have large amounts of data to move, and file and archive data to G Suite and Google Vault.

9. Extensive Use of Machine-Learning

Due to AppBridge, automatic scaling tools Team Drive is capable of connecting the source environment to scan and discover, as well as make a smooth transition to the Cloud. The architecture built in can take advantage of the unique strengths and capabilities of the Google Cloud infrastructure and the APIs and provide a solution that scales from one user migration to hundreds of thousands. Technology is designed to automatically parallelize the work that needs to be done on the server and solve traditional problems end-users came across, including multi-threading, log centralization, optimizing Google API calls.

Google, enjoying a vast network of system integration partners, provides the global enterprise support team on how to get the greatest benefit out of Team Drives for customers.

Google enables effective support in the drive to the Google Cloud for customers already running their apps in the cloud (Office 365, Box, Dropbox, Ignite) and customers using on-premises infrastructure or even older technology (Exchange 2007, older versions of SharePoint). Even G Suite domains can be used for migration, whereas direct migration of Google Team Drives is supported.

Incremental functionality built into the solution gives admins the ability to run G Suite migration initially and pick up all changes in later waves. Customers migrating millions of documents will inevitably have a couple of failures. That said, you can pick up and migrate only failures without re-crawling the source – just re-migrate the failures and fix them!

Team Drive has significantly invested in developing a digital agenda for business leaders cognizant of operations, business and technology. 

10. Enable Google Team Drives and Enhance Your Cyber Resilience with Spinbackup

Following Google’s Best Practices for Enterprise Organizations, Spinbackup adds outstanding functionality to G Suite and Google Team Drives. In the event of the malware attack, a Spinbackup solution can restore the broken or list data into an end user's account.