One of the main reasons behind a company move to the cloud is security and reliability. It also happens to be the main objection. So Google have put together ten reasons to trust them with your data.

Over three million businesses have moved to Google Apps, and several factors have driven this transition. While improved productivity and cost savings have long been at the top of the list, more and more customers are choosing Google Apps for Business for its security and reliability benefits. Below we’ll summarise the top ten data protection and reliability advantages that Google hear about most frequently from customers.

1. Powerful administration tools give you control of your data 
When business data is stored in Google Apps, administrators have powerful tools to help them manage things like users, documents and services.

2. Pure and proven cloud architecture 
The Google datacentre server infrastructure is specifically designed and built for Google applications and does not include unnecessary hardware or software code such as peripheral ports or device drivers.

3. Patch management 
Downloading, testing and deploying patches has become a significant pain for many IT departments. Google Apps reduces this pain because there are no servers for customers to patch.

4. Strong authentication 
Google Apps includes 2-step verification for all user accounts – at no additional charge.

5. Disaster recovery 
Google Apps offers robust disaster recovery capabilities which are commonly measured by Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RTO measures how long before users can access systems in the event of a failure and RPO measures how much of a gap there is in the data when it is restored. Google Apps is designed with RTO and RPO goals of zero.

6. Third party verifications 
Google Apps and data centres are SSAE 16 Type II audited and have achieved the U.S. Federal Government’s FISMA certification. SSAE 16 is an auditing standard where a third party auditor evaluates the controls in place for numerous areas including physical and logical security, privacy, incident response and more.

7. Information security expertise 
Google employ an information security team of over 250 people with a wealth of expertise not found in most organisations. Many have advanced degrees and are thought leaders in information security.

8. Secure connections for users 
Google automatically encrypt browser sessions for Google Apps users without the need for VPN’s or other potentially costly and cumbersome infrastructure.

9. High availability 
Google Apps has zero maintenance windows or planned downtime. While Google offer a 99.9% uptime SLA, Gmail exceeded this guarantee in 2010 and achieved 99.984% uptime.

10. Reduced risk of data breach 
Google Apps allows users to work securely on their data wherever they are, using a wide range of devices. The data is stored centrally in Google’s cloud which greatly reduces the need for users to take their data with them using USB drives or similar devices, which can be easily lost or stolen.

Over three million businesses trust Google to protect the data they store in Google Apps and make it reliably accessible. For more information on Google Apps security, visit our Data Security and Privacy page.

This blog summarised the top ten reasons to trust Google with company data – for more detail on these reasons, please visit the latest Google Enterprise Blog on Data Security.