Collaboration and Control in the Era of Hybrid Work By CIOtechOutlook Team

Collaboration and Control in the Era of Hybrid Work

CIOtechOutlook Team | Wednesday, 24 August 2022, 13:48 IST

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Collaboration and Control in the Era of Hybrid Work    Developing a hybrid-first work model starts with the tools people use every day to connect and collaborate. But it can only be realized with a single connected experience. This is what Google Workspace enables.

To gain a deeper understanding of the same, CIOTechOutlook conducted a webinar in partnership with Econz IT Services Pvt. Ltd., a Google Premier Partner, which offers a host of services including enterprise cloud computing and Google Workspace set up and integration; deployment and change management; integration and automation; and tech support.

 

The guests on the panel were:

Sujata Dusi, Lead - Customer Engineer, Google Workspace

Satyajeet Kuvalekar, Sales Director - Cloud, Econz IT Services

Bhushan Ladkhedkar, Head of Work Transformation, Cloud, Econz IT Services Pvt. Ltd.

Excerpts from the presentations of the panelists:

Powering the Hybrid Work Model with Google Workspace and Google Cloud  

Sujata Dusi: Google Workspace is a cloud-based solution that enables effective communication and collaboration amongst stakeholders of an organization through its three key aspects or pillars – Connect, Create and Control.

Sujata Dusi, Lead - Customer Engineer, Google WorkspaceIn line with its name, the Connect element of Google Workspace focuses primarily on facilitating user interaction and communication. This revolves around the critical aspects like – emails, calendars, chat, audio & video conferencing, as well as learning and development platforms that allow educators to engage with end users. Moreover, it also contains the App sheet, a platform that requires absolutely no coding and that aids users in building low-code apps, workflows, and unique needs for any sort of activity.

It is a comprehensive suite that includes Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, enabling end-users to easily have 100 individuals interact and collaborate with one another at once. All of it is supported by additional features like Google Forms, Sites, Jam boards, and App Script. There are also a number of add-ons that can be captured from the marketplace, helping to strengthen or extend the additions to other services.

"Workspace currently has more than three billion monthly active users. The platform handles 7.5 billion daily meeting minutes."

Admins have complete control over the business because, regardless of whether end users are using shared drives, cloud storage, or My Drive, the platform's inherent controls or security measures provide an organization with the greatest possible email security, data security, and access security. Device Management is also built into the platform, which helps with Secure Mobile Access. Further, the platform itself is compliant with all of the regulatory needs, such as — ISO 27001, 27018, 27019, SOC 2, SOC 3, etc.

Google Workspace is also boosting the culture of innovation. Starting with the power of Search, workspace helps the users to quickly look up information across the platform. With Workspace, any keyword whether it is in the title within the text within images or PDFs, users can quickly look up through the search that is embedded in all of the services. Moreover, no matter where end users are linked from, workspace provides the maximum agility. Whether using Gmail on a mobile device or the web, the user always has the choice and an integrated experience to connect and communicate. So, the overall idea is to reduce context switching, which we at Google believe takes a lot of time and affects the productivity of an end user.

We firmly believe that the power of cloud and also a true cloud solution helps our users with better security, as well as productivity. With no app to install, no worry about patchwork applications, it completely reduces the surface attack for any kind of vulnerabilities. As most of the users are familiar with the platform and all of the services, they are left with a minimal learning curve, which increases their productivity by allowing them to complete tasks more quickly, access information using the same browser, and truly foster an innovative culture. Cherry on the cake, there is AI that runs in the background, which makes it real fun for end users to go to work and get things done on a day to day basis. Several things like auto-complete of sentences, voice typing on a document, captions in the meetings are now embedded making things easy, interactive and fun for end users.

Workspace currently has more than three billion monthly active users. The platform further handles 7.5 billion daily meeting minutes, thereby providing an understanding of the scale at which Google Workspace is used. Furthermore, 40 of the 42 Unicorn entrances of 2021 are on Google workspace. The platform is also used by several colleges and universities globally. In a nutshell, our next generation of employees is growing up on Google workspace.

How Econz can add value in implementation of Google Cloud technologies

Satyajeet Kuvalekar: Google offers an unmatched reliability and scalability to today’s enterprises. Looking at some statistics, Gmail, the mailing solution of Google has more than three billion active monthly users. Moving to Google Chrome, the internet browser has evolved as the most preferred solution, not only in the consumer domain, but also for the enterprises. Presently, Chromes holds 89.05 percent of India’s browser market. Additionally, in the mobile phone operating systems, Android has been a clear market leader, especially in India, with 95.84 percent market share. And, lastly, the most critical asset of Google, the Google Search, has been the undisputed leader in the search engine space with 98.52 percent market share in India. These are evident to the reliability factor that Google brings with it. Furthermore, to view this from a Google Workspace perspective, it is your email communication and collaboration platform that never goes down.

Satyajeet Kuvalekar, Sales Director - Cloud, Econz IT Services Reliability and scalability being one, the solutions offered by Google are amongst the most preferred and used. Platforms like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Meet, etc, find an important space in our private use cases. This implies that most Indians are familiar with all of its tools. Hence, when an organization opts for Google Workspace, it ensures zero to negligible change management and training. In addition, Google Workspace also provides employees the freedom to work from any place, any device; thereby helping to actualize hybrid work culture and return to office in all the work models.

"We aim to transform the way the organizations work by harnessing the power of the cloud, while evolving as an integral partner for our clients to help them achieve their business goals."

With Google Workspace, the IT leaders can bring in more security and control. For example — when we look at identity-as-a-service, one can create a user identity within the Google Workspace and provide context aware access to the applications, based on roles of the employees. Workspace also contains single Sign On, mobile device management that is typically beneficial for the Android and iOS devices.  Moreover, if any organization intends to push in a high level of security based policies, Google Workspace is the right solution.

The information rights management on the flip end is extensively beneficial for email and data protection. With it, organizations can set an expiry date, and limit the access for every email and the attachments forwarded with it. Workspace also offers an extraordinary data loss prevention solution, wherein the users can set different policies to stop critical data being shared outside of your organization. It further provides tons of logs and security reports that can aid an organization in investigating even further. Google Workspace offers more than 176 different security based policies, preventing spoofing, phishing, malware attacks, and data loss.

Speaking about Econz, we are a 2006 founded company with a proficient team of more than 100 employees. We are a specialist in work transformation and have got about 2500+ customers in India and around the globe. Based out of Bangalore, we have extended our branches, not just in India, but also in the Gulf and the UK. We aim to transform the way the organizations work by harnessing the power of the cloud, while evolving as an integral partner for our clients to help them achieve their business goals. We typically work on three different fronts with Google, namely — Google Workspace, Chrome Enterprise and Google Cloud Platform. Our team strives to deliver an end-to-end assistance, starting with technology adoption to implementing the same while providing valuable assistance in enhancing the existing solution or process. All of that leads us to have an infrastructure modernization, or digital transformation along with workplace transformation for our clients.

In the Google workspace domain, we provide complete assistance to our clients in migration of their data from the existing legacy system to the new Google Workspace platform. Moreover, our team also provides training sessions to our clients, helping them harness the full potential of advanced features, and optimizing their processes to reduce turnaround times; thereby increasing the productivity. Last but not least, we also help our client’s employees, especially the IT teams, go through different certification programs directly from Google, making them independent of us as a support provider.

Deploying Google Workspace and how simple it can be to migrate  

Bhushan Ladkhedkar: Google Workspace can be implemented in a safe and secure way. From a general perspective, the migration starts with domain provisioning into Google repository, followed by domain verification, user/group provisioning, email authentication, three phase deployment, and data migration.

From a more detailed perspective, in domain provisioning we provision our clients' domain with the Google environment; thereby helping us to secure a particular domain for our clients. In the next user provisioning process, we implement different methods and technology, like – Active Directory, any identity provider, etc, wherein these solutions can be easily integrated with Google Workspace. However, if any enterprise doesn't want to use an active directory, Google can work as the identity provider by integrating different services like — SAML, LDAP, etc.” 

Bhushan Ladkhedkar, Head of Work Transformation, Cloud, Econz IT Services Pvt. Ltd.Progressing towards the three phase deployment method, this Google certified process ensures smooth transition to Google Workspace with no downtime or impact. As suggested by Google, the first revolves around the migration for the core IT team of an organization, and after the IT team gets comfortable with the change, we go to the next phrase, i.e., the early adopter, where we move towards migrating 15 percent employees of the entire organization. In the end, we come to global go live phase, and move organization to the Google Workspace. Post migration, we progress to support phase, wherein Econz deploys a dedicated support team to help our clients with every complication.  

"Change management does not always mean training the workforce or upscaling with new technology; it also means a cultural change. At Econz, we as partners, provide the right assistance to help our clients reap the most out of Google Workspace."

Moreover, while migrating to Google Workspace, we use only Google migration tools, ensuring no data leakage. To begin with, Google Workspace Migrate is used for complex or large migrations, and this helps to migrate any type of data like – SharePoint, in a seamless manner. Next comes Google Workspace Migration for Microsoft Exchange that is effective for IMAP, or PST migration. SEL nodes data can also be migrated to Google Workspace.

Coming to change management, it does not always mean training the workforce or upscaling with new technology; this also means a cultural change. At Econz, we as partners provide the right assistance to help our clients reap the most out of the Workspace.”

With extensive crucial insights provided by the panelists, attendees of the webinar gained a deep and well-structured notion about the benefits of Google Workspace and how its implementation can turn around the productivity, in turn reducing the operational cost.

 

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