Once you have your domain name you will most likely want to start using it to send and receive email. This reinforces your brand and provides some level of credibility in the marketplace. Among the many service providers Google’s G Suite stands out for quality, business benefit, and value.
Although we focus on email in this article, G Suite provides other services that you can take advantage of. We briefly discuss these later on.
There are a number of reasons why we recommend that you use Google’s G Suite for your business email. The two main reasons for us are reliability and management.
Reliability
Google’s solutions page states: “Google’s ultra-reliable servers guarantee 99.9% uptime on your email. Industry-leading security, spam protection, and automatic backups help protect your business data.”
Google’s claim of 99.9% uptime amounts to about 44 minutes of unscheduled downtime per month or less than 9 hours per year. That’s a reliable service.
Separation of Web Hosting and Email
When your email and web hosting are with the same provider you may not be able to contact your customers if your hosting provider is attacked or has a data centre disaster. The last thing you want is that your web site goes down AND customers emails bounce because your hosting provider servers are down. Your customers are left wondering if you’ve suddenly gone out of business and your reputation is damaged.
Admittedly, you can use social media to let customers and suppliers know what’s going on but not everyone uses social media for business communications.
Trusted Third Party
Using G Suite for email means that your communications are less likely to end up in someone’s Spam folder. The reality is that, if you use shared hosting like the majority of us, the actions of someone else on the same hosting provider may impact your ability to reliably deliver email to your customers.
If your email originates from a Google server then there is much less chance that the recipient will classify your email as spam.
Availability
Managing email servers properly is hard and prone to errors. Hackers and spammers are always looking for email servers that can be compromised so they can send their spam. Failing to keep up with software updates can leave you vulnerable. Even the best intentioned hosting providers may not have the technical expertise to block every exploit and keep your email service running around the clock.
When your provider discovers a problem it may take them many hours or days to restore your service.
You can be assured that Google’s technical teams are working continuously to ensure that their service is available and resistant to spammer exploits.
Security
Aside from spammers getting to use your email at your expense, another type of hacker is looking for confidential company information. This could include contracts with suppliers and customers or banking and credit card information that they can sell. In this case you may not even know that your email has been stolen unless your hosting provider discovers the breach and notifies you.
Malware
A hacked mail server may be used to propagate malware or viruses. Your reputation is on the line if your customer’s systems become infected from email sent from your server. G Suite email servers run the latest security and spam prevention software and are always up to date.
Malware from your email could also infect your own computers and prevent you from accessing your business information.
Management
The next compelling reason we recommend G Suite is management.
Email Ownership
Business email sent and received is important company property and needs proper management. Employees should never use personal email accounts for company business. Firstly, it dilutes your brand and may confuse your customers. Secondly, access to important business correspondence may be lost when an employee leaves the company. This may not be a malicious act on the part of the departing employee but it could leave you lacking important information supporting your legal, statutory, or substantiation obligations.
Ensuring that all your email is under your control is a first important step in managing your business information.
Email Management
If it is easy to manage your email accounts then it is more likely that you will achieve good email management.
Good email management includes:
- Adding new employee email accounts so that business correspondence is routed to the correct person
- Creating multiple email aliases to segregate inbound email and improve your internal processes and productivity
- Suspension of an email account when an employee leaves
- Migration of a former employee’s email to another user account to ensure that attachments and documents aren’t lost and the business continues uninterrupted
- Archiving your email to meet legal, statutory, or substantiation requirements
- Deletion of unused email accounts to manage your monthly costs
Google G Suite puts management of all your email accounts under a single dashboard.
Other Reasons to Use G Suite
Reliability and management are compelling reasons to use Google G-Suite for your business but there are many other features of G Suite that you will be able to take advantage of once you’ve signed up.
Google G Suite includes
- 30GB of cloud storage per user for your your email and files
- Video and voice conferencing
- Shared calendars to help you schedule your work and your interaction with clients so there is less telephone tag
- Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, all of which can be shared between your staff and even worked on collaboratively
- Share information across all of your devices
- Security and administration controls which make it easy to manage your users and devices so your company information stays safe
Extra Tools and Integrations
Google G-Suite provides additional free and paid-for tools through their G-Suite Marketplace. Orotena does not use or recommend any additional third party tools that you may find in the G-Suite Marketplace. This article would be incomplete without pointing that there are a variety of extras that may be just what you are looking for to solve a particular business problem.
Orotena is an affiliate for Google G Suite and therefore some articles may contain links to products or services for which we receive a small commission. We only place affiliate links for products we know will be useful to your business and can confidently recommend.
We appreciate when you choose to use our links to click through and make a purchase. Sign up for Google G Suite now using our affiliate link below and you will also receive an additional 20% off your first year.
