You’ve chosen to make a good choice in using Cloud Workspace for your business. All your employees use either Google Workspace (GWS) or Microsoft 365 (M365).

Digital Workspace Solutions

Benefits

With a Digital Workspace you get some great tools that you don’t get with free, cheap or on-premise email accounts:

1. Team integration with: calendars, contact lists, and shared document archives (Google Shared Drives or Microsoft Teams)
2. Video meeting tools (Google Meet or Google Teams)
3. Email cyberattack filtering and phishing warnings
4. A large amount of storage space per user (up to 5Tb/user aggregated across the organization for GWS)
5. Remote workforce support (employees can remotely log into their cloud account without the need for any sort of VPN)

Limitations

But there are things that Digital Workspaces on their own don’t provide:

• A file deleted in the cloud can only be recovered within a brief amount of time (usually 30 days) before it is lost forever.
• A file changed accidentally might be changed forever (depending on change tracking settings).

Scenarios where this might be a problem

There are a number of situations where this need can arise. For example:

1. A new, untrained, or harried team member edits the wrong proposal and then saves those changes.
2. A disgruntled employee decides to delete or sabotage files before leaving the organization.
3. A team member meant to open a proposal document as a template and then use “Save as…” to store it in a new customer’s folder. Instead they accidentally clicks “Save” and write over the original template.
4. An employee left. You want to share their work products among new team members who will be taking over their portfolio. For example, Jennifer’s communications with ACME Corp. are now assigned to Ben; while her files with ZORG Industries should go to Kim.
5. Or Jennifer has left the company but you want to keep her files for now. In the meantime, you’ll be paying the full price for an idle Workspace license.

Digital Workspace Backups

There is a solution to all these scenarios: Digital Workspace Backups.

What are they?

Digital Workspace Backups are provided by third parties. They manage agent software that can extract GWS or M365 user and shared data (emails, calendars, contacts, personal drive files (Google My Drive or Microsoft OneDrive) and shared/team data (Google Shared Drives or Microsoft Teams/SharePoint) up to 3 times a day (roughly every 8 hours) and store it in a Canadian located third-party data-centre. They also use cybersecurity best-practices to make sure your stored data is secure and safe.

How they can protect your data

Do you want to recover the version of the proposal Jennifer was working on for ZORG Industries from January 10? It now be done with a quick search of the backup archives. Those files can be recovered to Kim’s workspace account.

SDWS backups also honour the rules of “evidentiary custody” by ensuring that the user data wasn’t altered/modified after the user last edited it. This is important should there ever be a need to present this data in court.

And the best part is that the Digital Workspace backup costs for a user account are about 1/3 to 1/4 the price of a Google or Microsoft workspace license. You still need the license for active team members, but if you just want to suspend or archive unused accounts for now, this is a much more economical option than the choices provided by Google or Microsoft.