3 Reasons to Upgrade your G Suite Basic Licenses to Business

Many of the organisations are still using G Suite Basic - the entry level licence - because that’s how you started using G Suite if you too haven’t thought of upgrading. Maybe you think about why you would need to upgrade your favourite collaboration tools licences from G Suite Basic to the next level of subscription, which is G Suite Business. The easiest way to convince yourself is by understanding some limitations of G Suite Basic for growing companies.

While evaluating G Suite Business, you can take into account the following 3 advantages of Business over Basic version.

They are at the same time the reasons why we advise most businesses to make the upgrade to Business. 

1. G Suite Business comes with Shared Drives

G Suite Basic does not have the availability to structurally share documents within your organisation because of the unavailability of Shared Drives (previously called “Team Drives”). In G Suite Basic, you just have access to the My Drive tool. 

The Shared Drives functionality includes enterprise document management controls, where My Drive is mostly just a consumer tool to share loose documents and folders. As a consequence, you can’t replace your file server, Box or Dropbox for Business environment when you only have My Drive and no Shared Drives.

So what’s exactly the issue with using My Drive in your company, you might wonder? Here is a quick explanation:

• The first issue with My Drive is that you don’t have any admin controls over the creation and the permission management of folders that your users share. 
• The second issue with My Drive for businesses is that the creator of a document is always the owner of the document. The document is therefore attached to the account of the creator. So if the creator leaves the company and his or her account is deleted, the documents will be deleted as well. 
• Another problem with My Drive is the fact that there is no common bin for a shared My Drive folder. Everyone with edit permissions can delete files and folders in a shared folder, but it is an absolute nightmare to restore the documents of a shared folder. Try it out for yourself.
• The last issue with My Drive is the fact that you can’t set security controls on the shared folder. You can’t restrict the re-sharing of these shared folders, nor can you restrict the sharing externally. I don’t have to explain that this is certainly a security risk, especially for some shared folders like finance, HR, R&D.

G Suite's Shared Drives, previously called “Team Drives”, solve these security and structure issues in an easy way. Instead of the files being owned by a specific user, like is the case in My Drive, the files in Shared Drives belong to a team and not to an individual. So when a user leaves your company, the files he or she created stay exactly where they are.

2. Drive audit log in G Suite Business

Imagine that an employee is about to leave your company to work for a competitor. This employee starts sharing files with his personal @gmail.com account or massively starts downloading R&D information.

If you are using G Suite Basic, you may never notice these activities, and you can’t audit these actions either. We don’t have to explain that is a huge security risk which can be prevented with Drive audit logs and Drive activity alerts to which you have access in G Suite Business.

3. G Suite Business comprises with Google Vault

If an employee decides to leave the organisation and starts deleting his entire MyDrive weeks before he actually leaves, without an audit log and having retention policies, you will only realise when it’s too late.

In G Suite Business, you have access to a great tool called Google Vault. This is a web-based tool from Google that will help you with setting retention rules, legal holds on users, searching.

your domain’s data, exports of data for additional processing and review, and along with Audit reporting to learn about actions Vault admins have taken.

When you take a look at the main reasons to upgrade your G Suite licenses from Basic to Business, it largely comes down to one important aspect: SECURITY. While G Suite Basic is a fantastic way to start enhancing collaboration and communication in your company, an upgrade to G Suite Business is a true must-do once you start growing. In short, What G Suite Business does, is helping you to structure and secure your company to a base level. You are rest assured that your company data stays organised and secure, even when your number of employees using G Suite is growing.

Now, you have a great opportunity to upgrade to G Suite Business and gain access to:

• Enhanced security and data protection
• Archiving & Retention to reduce risk and hassles
• Unlimited storage

Infiflex Upgrade Team is focused on helping organisations upgrade to Business or Enterprise versions. In my next article, I will consider upgrading to the Enterprise version. For any queries or clarification on upgrades, please reach me <Your coordinates>.