The Cloud Born Advantages and Benefits of Having G Suite Business.

Google’s G Suite Business Edition is a well reviewed professional version of Google’s online office platform with PC Magazine noting that “G Suite is a superbly powerful and elegant choice and an Editors' Choice winner for business-class cloud-based office suites.” With multiple G Suite editions, it's important which is right for your business. Here is a brief overview of the advantages a G Suite Business Edition subscription has and how it compares to other G Suite Options.

While many of the benefits and advantage of G Suite Business are shared with their basic and enterprise partners, we do not recommend G Suite basic for professional purposes beyond a small 2-3 person shop.

Some advantages offered by having G Suite Business

Unlimited Storage Space: as G Suite is a cloud based platform storage space is of utmost importance. G Suite Business Edition offers unlimited storage space for Google Photos, Gmail, and Google Drive for file upload and sharing. Note that if your company has 4 or fewer users each user receives 1 TB (terabyte) of storage space. To give you an idea of storage scale 1 TB can hold roughly 310,00 photos, 17,000 hours of music or 40 days worth of video give or take.

Google Cloud Search: Allows you to search company files stored by G Suite services company wide. What this means is you have full access to important company data no matter which employee created or stored the content. This allows information to be easily accessible and not be lost due to the information being stored by a specific user.

Google Vault: The e-discovery and archiving platform allows you to set retention policies based on any G mail or drive search operator and provides peace of mind in legal and compliance matters.

Google Hangouts: Google Hangouts is still finding it's place in G Suite Business. There's the traditional browser, desktop and mobile app that's identical to the consumer version except for the fact that you can force chats to be on the records. It's still unclear how G Suite business has differentiators in Hangouts Meet, a spinoff of the original App that provides basic video conference and screen sharing capabilities similar to GotoMeetings or the like. The new Hangouts Chat is a slack competitor in the "Early Adopter Program" This functionality is expected to be limited to the business and enterprise versions.

Apps Admin Console: There is additional functionality in the G Suite Admin Console for users of the Business Edition. Seemingly basic options like allowing OCR in Email attachments is now reserved for G Suite Business customers.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) in Gmail and Google Apps was released in 2012 to All G Suite customers. This and other Admin Console features were crippled in G Suite Basic when Google Cloud rebranded Apps for Work as G Suite Basic and Business. The availability of small but meaningful features is a reason to be bitter at but choose G Suite Business over Basic. It's unclear if the OCR feature was also disabled in the Free Gmail consumer version of Apps during the latest rebrand.

G Suite Business - Technical Administrative Features

As an administrator, you have several useful tools at your disposal to manage the company domain, users, and apps. Some of the Google Admin console features include:

G Suite vault, ediscovery to archive and store company information as needed.
Advanced reporting that can be used to audit driver logs, issue alerts, and report on events that occur on mobile devices.
Alerts to inform you when certain actions are performed on Google Drive. For example, you can be alerted when company data (such as a spreadsheet) is shared outside of your business network.
Physical Security Keys can be issued as needed to your employees and be purchased at a discount.
The ability to restrict tasks you can control user access by organizational unit they belong to. For example, you can make it so certain departments only have access to certain files.
Auto backup and sync files stored locally on user computers with Google Drive to make sure all information is current.
Passlist trusted domains to allows sharing of company documentation with approved parties, application tools, or business partners.
Enable or Disable the ability to Edit documents in offline mode when online access is not available.
Allow or Deny the use of 3rd party apps installed from the Chrome Web Store to open files from G Suite.
Allow or Deny installation of 3rd party extension to enhance Google Docs.

G Suite Business Edition Versus Other Editions of G Suite

When compared to other G Suite Subscription options G Suite Business Edition differs in these ways.

Compared To G Suite Basic: in terms of basic features, G Suite Business adds the ability to use Google vault, retain emails, and also unified search across various G Suite Applications and your local domain. Advanced differences are notable as the business edition adds security keys, auditing of mobile devices, Google Drive reporting and audits, and advanced features for drive administration. Also, G Suite Basic is limited to 3 auto provisioning apps G Suite Business Edition has no such limitations.
Compared To G Suite Enterprise: the key difference between business and enterprise editions is what the enterprise edition adds. Enterprise’s exclusive features are data loss prevention for Drive and Gmail, email logs in BigQuery, access to 3rd party archiving tools for Gmail, security key management, and hosted S/MIME for Gmail encryption. As with many enterprise solutions, its specializations are related to advanced security and data management or recovery.

Final Thoughts

As the above information shows G Suite Business Edition is a practical solution for many business's needs. Aside from the innate accessibility and hardware advantages a cloud based office suite platform offers G Suite Business Edition offers many useful features. G Suite Business Edition removes any concerns you may have about storage space, makes files easily searchable, and offers IT administration several tools to organize and protect your business’s information.