Spring Cleaning Past Employee Accounts
It may be the second day of Spring here in New England, but the kids are home from school and the plows were out early. Nothing like a post-winter snow to trigger the spring cleaning bug in us all. For those that work in the cloud, the start of Spring is a great time to review our licenses and our needs and to make sure we are cleaned up and ready for new growth. If you are using Google Apps For Work (GAFW) or Google Apps Unlimited (GAU), now is a great time to clean out accounts for past employees.
Easier Said Than Done
Google Apps has a simple licensing model. Pay $50 or $120 per user per year, respectively, and users have access to everything Google Apps has to offer. The challenge comes in when employees leave. If you want to preserve their data, your options within Google Apps are limited, and can become costly. Specifically, you can expect to pay:
- $50 per user per year to keep a past employee’s GAFW account
- $100 per user per year if you also have Vault
- $120 per user per year to keep a suspended GAU account
You Do Have Options
As noted in our recent eBook, A Guide to Google Apps License Management, we discuss several strategies, including: using an “archive” account, sync & store, and cloud backup. Both the “archive” and “sync & store” approaches are inexpensive, they are not very cost effective. If you are keeping past employees’ data, you want the information to be easy to find an usable. These solutions can make finding and retrieving information difficult and can alter the format and formatting of documents.
Our recommended solution uses cloud backup. Backup past users to a 3rd party service that lets you restore the data to any active user if and when you need it. It is easy to keep calendar entries, contacts, files, and emails. File formats and formatting are preserved. Finding information is easy with robust search tools.
And, the cost is affordable. Backupify for Google Apps lets your create and keep an employee archive for $24 (or less!) per account per year. This is half the cost of protecting active users, and 50% to 80% less than keeping the Google Apps accounts active. And, you avoid the risk of damaging or losing data while shuffling information to other users or into “archive” accounts.
Contact Us
To learn more about our proven solution, along with current special offers, please contact us.
