Google Workspace
Everything you need to get work done, now in one place
Our Google Workspace implementation expertise and additional services, which include training, integration, cloud application development and a comprehensive support service, makes Refractiv your perfect deployment and technology partner.
Google Workspace Features
Connect, Create, Access, Control
 Gmail Secure, private, ad-free email for your business |
 Drive Secure file storage allowing real-time collaboration |
 Calendar Schedule meetings, share calendars, manage resources |
 Admin Console Manage Google Workspace for your organisation |
 Google Meet Instant chat and video meetings |
 Sites Create and collaborate with team websites |
 Documents Collaborative content creation tools like Docs, Sheets, Slides and more |
 Vault Archiving and eDiscovery for email, files and chats |
Formedix is all about creating time and cost efficiencies for our clients by developing smart, well thought out solutions for other companies. We wanted to replicate these same efficiencies inside our own company, so the move to Google Workspace was a natural and effective choice. We are already benefiting from the change in the way that we communicate and collaborate as a team and have made significant cost savings at the same time.
— Mark Wheeldon, CEO and Founder, Formedix
We wanted to make sure our team could work and collaborate in the smartest possible way and get the most from our Google Workspace investment. With help from Refractiv, we’ve improved the way we operate as a team and as an organisation. A considered review of the way we work coupled with a bit of expert advice has made a huge difference.
— Andy Davies, Managing Director, Somerford Associates
Having experienced the benefits of Gmail, we are keen to implement the rest of the Google Workspace platform as soon as possible. Gmail has delivered cost and time savings and also improved collaboration between branches, so we’re already feeling the benefits across the business.
— David Hewitson, IT Director, Scrivens Opticians
Google Workspace Deployment and Implementation
As a Google Partner, we’ve got everything you need for a smooth transition to Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) from legacy email and office solutions, including Office 365.
We don’t believe that one size fits all so we work closely with you and your team to figure out what you need and how it is best delivered so you don’t waste time, money or goodwill when you make the switch.
We’ll work with you on a deployment plan which includes the scope, responsibilities, resources, timescales technical details. We normally start with a project kick-off conference call.
We look at your existing set up, your people and your kit to develop an implementation plan that will deliver a smooth and simple move to Google Workspace.
A change management plan delivers a smooth move to Google Workspace without wasting company time, losing productivity or the good will of your team. It’s not rocket science – just clear communication, good training and great Google Workspace support.
What are the costs? Google Workspace costs can vary based on the size of your organisation and the functionality you need. Explore Google Workspace subscription plans or send us a message if you need help choosing the right plan for your business.
Google has spent years developing one of the world’s most advanced and secure infrastructures, including dozens of features to keep your data secure and safe. These features include automatic backup, data encryption and two-step authentication. With Google your data belongs to you. You control it and you decide who, when and how you share it. Read more. Does Google Encrypt my Data? Yes. Data is encrypted at several levels. Google forces HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) for all transmissions between users and Google Workspace services and uses Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) for all its services. Google also encrypts message transmissions with other mail servers using 256-bit Transport Layer Security (TLS) and utilises 2048 RSA encryption keys for the validation and key exchange phases. This protects message communications when client users send and receive emails with external parties also using TLS. How does Google prevent against hackers and other intruders? The technology, scale and agility of our infrastructure bring you unique security benefits. Our data centers are built with custom-designed servers, running our own operating system for security and performance. Google’s 450 security engineers, including some of the world’s foremost experts, work around the clock to spot threats early and respond quickly. We get better as we learn from each incident, and even incentivise the security research community, with which we actively engage, to expose our systems’ vulnerabilities.Google Workspace Security & Privacy
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FAQs
Have a question about using Google Workspace? We just might have the answer!
Take a look at the business advantages of Google Workspace which other customers have found out for themselves.
Business challenges:
- Cost and resource-draining IT challenges such as unreliable servers, setup and maintenance expenses and operating a multi-OS environment
- Small email inboxes
- Virus attacks, Spam and phishing
- Compliance to internal and external policies
- Consumption of disk space
- Inefficient sharing and collaboration
How Google Workspace solves these business challenges:
- Dramatically lowers your total cost of ownership. No hidden maintenance or upgrade expenses – since Google hosts your data, they absorb those costs so that you don’t have to.
- Boost employee productivity with 30GB of storage per user – your employees can focus on their work rather than on their email quota.
- Lean on Google’s 99.9% service level agreement for email to make sure your business is up-and-running.
- Share information, don’t send it. Real-time document editing cuts down the hassle of sending email attachments and version confusion.
- You’re actually safer with Google Workspace. Since your data is hosted on Google’s reliable and redundant data centers, you can stop saving your corporate data on insecure devices, a leading cause of data security problems.
- Better message control over what comes in and what goes out of your company with Google Workspace’ message security and administrative management controls.
- Access anywhere, anytime you have an internet connection – whether on your mobile device, laptop, or computer in a multi-OS environment (PC, Mac, Linux).
Google Workspace is a web-based hosted solution, which means you can access Google Workspace at anytime, anywhere you have an internet connection. You might hear this type of technology referred to as “software-as-a-service” or “cloud computing”. “Cloud computing” or “software-as-a-service” is a computing model in which IT applications are provided “as a service”, allowing users to access these applications from the Internet (“in the cloud”) without needing to maintain the infrastructure that supports them. A simple way to understand the model is how people currently allow companies to run and manage their electricity rather than generating it within their home/office themselves.
With Google Workspace, your data and the applications themselves are served from Google’s highly secure, scalable, and reliable data centers. Google actually builds its own data centers from scratch, so they are able to have one of the lowest cost-per-server infrastructures in the world; which means that those savings are passed on to Google Workspace customers. Your business is able to offload the infrastructure costs and the effort it takes to maintain an on-premises solution, and focus those savings on more strategic IT initiatives.
And since Google Workspace is web-based, your employees can be productive from anywhere, whether they’re at their own desk, using a different computer, or on the go with a mobile device.
Over 5,000 businesses per day are signing up on the Google Workspace platform. And let’s not forget that Google Inc. itself is running its company of 20,000+ employees on Google Workspace.
Our customers continue to find that Google Workspace is a great alternative of a hosted solution to other alternate on-premise solutions, such as Microsoft 365. Here are some of their reasons why: Lower cost: Google delivers Google Workspace to your business over the Web at a fraction of the cost of installed systems. This means that Google Workspace can provide a significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Mailbox redundancy, infrastructure upgrades and infrastructure scaling are all handled behind the scenes by Google, so your business doesn’t need to budget time and money for these projects. Higher quality: Google Workspace offers superior security, reliability and storage space than most organisations can accomplish with an on-premises solution. Improved usability: Google Workspace provides the simple, intuitive interface so that there’s minimal training resources involved for end-users. Leader in Innovation: Google continues to demonstrate its industry leadership in terms of web-based innovation. Driving this platform forward, Google has the leading computing platform and has assembled one of the strongest teams of computer scientists in the industry. As a Google Workspace customer you get to experience that innovation first-hand as product enhancements are rolled out on a regular basis.
To help your business make the switch to Google Workspace easier, smooth IMAP migration from other platforms to Google Workspace is available; this allows administrators to migrate a handful or a few thousand user mailboxes from an existing mail system to corresponding Google Workspace mail accounts. Google Workspace currently supports migration from Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003, Cyrus IMAP Server, Courier-IMAP, and Dovecot via the IMAP protocol. You can find more details on our migration page.
The Google Workspace solution for work is a packaged product of Google’s best messaging and collaboration applications, among which include Gmail, Google Meet, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Docs, Slides, and Sheets.
You may have had experience using many of these applications with your user@gmail.com account, and while these applications are similar, Google has enhanced them in Google Workspace with these critical differences:
1. Google Workspace is for your business
When you sign up for Google Workspace for your business, you sign up with your own company domain name. So rather than having a user@gmail.com email address, you would create or maintain a company email address such as user@company.com. There is an IT administrative control panel that is built into Google Workspace for your business where an IT administrator can manage and control the user accounts across your company domain.
2. Enhanced business-oriented features
Though product engineers are continually enhancing Google applications for free consumers, they are also adding separate, enhanced features to the Google Workspace applications that are more oriented for business purposes. Here are just a few things you can do in Google Workspace for your business that are not available in free consumer applications:
- Increased Access Controls: Puts your company in control of how your information is shared and communicated outside of your domain.
- Gmail: Saves all your corporate information with improved mailing list capabilities and increased mail thresholds.
- Google Sites: Understanding that a company intranet and shared documentation is so critical to success, optimised to provide you with the right storage quotas to address your business needs
- Google Calendar: Enables conference room and resource sharing, allowing you to schedule office conference rooms or other shared resources in your office.
We understand that employees want to be able to work where they want when they want, to do so they are taking the data with them. Businesses are finding themselves in the position where more and more employees are burning corporate data onto CD/DVD, thumb drives, putting data on their home machines to work on in the evenings and weekends. This has created serious security concerns, because not only do these incidents expose the data to unwanted eyes but often times we lose the data permanently since much of data resides on laptops or desktops.
As such, Google takes the privacy and security of Google Workspace customer data very seriously. Security is core to Google’s DNA. The products are designed with security considerations upfront, not as afterthoughts, and Google’s Security team is comprised of some of the world’s leading experts in information, application and network security. The infrastructure is composed of tens of thousands of identical systems and we have custom built hardware. Our machines are built on a custom Linux software stack that is hardened and only has the necessary components and services to run the Google requirements, making it easy to uniformly update of all systems. Each single piece of data is replicated in multiple datacenters, so your Google Workspace email is replicated to a primary and a backup data center, that are replicated in real time.
Businesses who want to run an on-premise email solution alongside Google Workspace are looking to either:
Test Google Workspace while running their existing mail solution as an interim transitional step between a on-premises email solution and a full hosted email solution.
Use Google Workspace as a back-up to their on-premise solution, such as Office 365.
Both scenarios are definitely possible with Google Workspace. Google Workspace generally provides the flexibility to do whatever you need to do with your email, it’s just a question of how much configuration you have to do on your end for your specific business needs. Once everything is in place, and incoming/outgoing email is being captured in Google Workspace, you will be able to move over seamlessly to Google Workspace should the need arise. We think that as you come to be comfortable with the cost, reliability, and convenience of Google-hosted email, you and your users will be able to transition over to Google Workspace as a complete solution.
You can either a) route your domain’s mail with an MX record change directly to Google Workspace, and have it delivered to Google Workspace mailboxes, and then passed onto your existing server, or b) set up an intermediary mail gateway that can dual-deliver mail to both Google Workspace and your existing mail server. This should ensure that incoming mail is available in both systems.
For outbound mail, you will have to set up your existing mail system to send your domain’s mail through Google Workspace.
There’s also a directory sync tool via a Single-Sign-On (SSO) API so that your business’ active directory integrates seamlessly alongside Google Workspace. Google Workspace Single Sign-on API lets you:
Integrate your own authentication or LDAP system with Google Workspace and securely login your users to Google Workspace based on your own security standards.
Integrate with leading web single sign on systems, or facilitate authentication via Active Directory or other directory servers.
Integrate Google Workspace with websites that have their own username and authentication mechanisms, eliminating the need for users to log in multiple times.
If you are interested in deploying Google Workspace, but require SSO or LDAP integration, we recommend one of two solutions:
You can use the SSO API to sync users’ names and passwords when a user sets them on your system. While this will not keep your users’ passwords exactly in sync, it does allow our system to have the same password as your SSO. This also allows for increased access to system beyond the web interface.
Google Workspace’ SAML 2.0-based SSO integration allows you to hold all your users’ accounts and passwords without the need for Google Workspace to hold any user passwords.
Each account can currently send email to 2,000 external recipients per day to prevent abuse of our system and to help fight spam. If one of your mail accounts reaches the limit, the account will be temporarily unable to send mail.
Google Sites is designed to make it easy for employees to create and collaborate on internal sites for their projects, teams and departments. You can also make a public website with Google Sites, but most businesses prefer to go with a traditional web hosting solution for their public sites.
If you’re looking for more dynamic or advanced web solutions for your public web site, you may want to run Google Workspace in addition to a web host. Any web host that provides the technology or platform you need to run your services should work with Google Sites. Two of our web host partners that register domains are Enom and Go Daddy.
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