G Suite Paves a Path for Digital Transformation

SADA Says | Cloud Computing Blog

By SADA Says | Cloud Computing Blog

Digital transformation is top of mind for enterprises in all industries and fields. Their hope is to apply innovative technologies like cloud to help them eliminate infrastructure overhead, improve business efficiency, and benefit from continuous innovation through new digital channels and solutions.

Executives are intrigued by it because it connotes innovation and progress. Workers hope it will give them a more agile environment in which to solve problems and collaborate with teams. Customers like it because it promises more options to engage and user-friendly ways of doing consuming. These are clearly some lofty goals, and some enterprises, while hopeful, don’t know where to start; many erroneously see digital transformation as too big of a task and are stalling in their efforts to move forward. Not surprisingly, however, Google has been astute in developing G Suite as a tool for digital transformation for organizations looking to start their cloud journey to accommodate their growing mobile teams, scaling to meet their business goals, and increasing productivity.

According to a study from the Altimeter Group, CEOs and CMOs are driving much of the digital transformation efforts in companies, but it falls to the CIO to map business goals with technology capabilities. Their challenge is to deliver solutions that fall within budget and security needs but still achieve aggressive business goals that serve many audiences across the organization’s ecosystem. G Suite is cloud-based set of collaboration and productivity tools delivering a feature-rich and evolving applications, paired with the CIO’s desire to integrate existing technologies and processes with new governance, operations, and adoption models (and, also to do it quickly). It’s also just plain easy to use, and usability correlates to productivity.

Some enterprises will continue to rely on a mash up of different services and applications to achieve their transformation goals, but with the right development and implementation partner, G Suite can become the digital system of record for any enterprise. There are three critical elements that neither legacy systems nor application-specific cloud solutions can provide.

More agile with G Suite

One of the interesting things Altimeter points out is how the drive to transform is largely a result of “evolving customer behaviors and preferences.” To some degree this is about giving customers an easier way to engage and transact. But it’s also about creating a more nimble organization that can direct time normally spent on infrastructure and process issues, and reassign them to efforts with a customer focus.

The challenge is to rapidly move enable the enterprise to be more nimble, which clearly involves the use of new technology, but it has to be judiciously rolled out with accompanying business best practices in order to develop better solutions. G Suite acts as an enterprise dashboard. It combines Gmail into a full range of document apps (Docs, Sheets, Slides), then collaboration tools (Hangouts, Chat), and now it boasts a massive, and growing, library of third-party apps that can be used to enhance the basic platform.

If enterprises are going to update the way they do business, they need their solutions to adhere to rigorous security, scalability, and continuous agility. SADA worked closely with Colgate-Palmolive to migrate and adopt G Suite to 28,000 global users across various product and development teams. Their goal is to increase productivity among workers, especially those working remotely who need support for standard process and business organization tasks. It’s been a shift both in IT strategy and in company culture. The improvements in team collaboration, communication, and infrastructure management will enable teams to rapidly adapt and be more responsive to market trends and customer needs.

Customize the digital experience

The promise of agility in the cloud is not just about speed, it’s all about delivering a unique experience. It enables them to differentiate their brand and offerings, and in legacy infrastructures it was complex, the elastic and flexible nature of the cloud enables rapid delivery of customized applications, interfaces, and experiences. SADA Systems is using G Suite to help customers develop customer- and employee-facing solutions that are unique to the audience and result in powerful engagement.

The G Suite platform is already robust and extensible. Our customers and partners benefit from G Suite’s innate extensibility and integration (both among Google applications and with APIs to third-party tools as well). They can get a robust business engine by combining Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, and other applications into a unique business productivity and collaboration solution across the enterprise. But they can also use that engine to transact data from different sources and repositories and serve it to customers in ways that are unique to their needs.

Digital First Media (DFM) is a multi-platform news and original content media provider, and is the second largest newspaper company in the United States by circulation, serving an audience of over 40 million readers on a monthly basis. The Company’s portfolio of products includes 67 daily newspapers and 180 non-daily publications. Clearly, coordination and efficiency is key to producing so much timely content, and doing it through digital channels is critical in an industry that has gone through major disruption over the past two decades.

The company had different business units using their own versions of calendars and contact systems, which prevented Sales teams from sharing information; that was an issue for working with prospects and providing effective service to existing customers. After a review of employee technology behaviors, DFM determined that with so many employees already using Google applications for business or personal reasons, standardizing on G Suite across the entire company with existing and custom-built apps would be an effective and non-disruptive way to improve how they conducted business.

Enterprise-grade security supports digital transformation

Any change to an organization’s infrastructure is going to be met with questions about security. It’s critical that any platform and application that touches sensitive data is reliable and can use the vast and definitive security expertise and continuous innovation that G Suite integrates into the cloud experience for their customers.

G Suite sits on Google’s Cloud Platform, which uses specific security for its different layers. Enterprises should monitor their security and compliance status, but using G Suite gives them the benefit of strict security policies and requirements that are unique to each layer of the cloud stack.

With rigorous security for physical data centers, platform-specific features, and teams of some of the most experienced cloud security experts, G Suite is built for the kind of high transaction, engaged type of environment most digital customers are in. This helps CIOs make the case internally for adopting digital methods that can drive business goals; disruption make create a bit of change, but the security posture will only become stronger.

Digital transformation relies heavily on technology, but that technology must be flexible and able to adapt as an organization changes. Google G Suite is a tool designed to continuously adapt as needed to organizational and customer needs as they grow and change. And because it’s developed to meet the needs of many different types of users, when combined with the development and practical experience of a partner like SADA, customers can use G Suite to gracefully, and in a sustainable way, evolve their organization into one ready to capitalize on the benefits of digital-savvy users.

Google’s G Suite Enterprise product can now be implemented with new security and collaboration tools. So what are these new features, and how can they drive enterprise productivity while also adhering to industry regulations?

  • Dial-in conferencing
  • Data Loss Prevention
  • Deep Attachment Scanning
  • Security Keys
  • Advanced Mobile Device Management

Change can be hard. As your company goes through digital transformation, click the button below to access our brief, “How to Manage Change When Adopting New Technology or Tools in Your Business.”

 

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