Transcript

Hailee Zapata:

Welcome to our webinar on mastering data retention and compliance in the cloud.

I'd like to introduce myself. I'm Hailee Zapata. I'll be popping on and off your screen as the host today.

So, over the next 40- 45 minutes, we're going to talk about how to implement robust data retention policies, streamlining backup and archive processes with CloudM's solutions. We're going to go over some real world examples of improving data management in the cloud. And then, as always, at the end of the session, we will do a live Q& A with our experts.

I do want to talk about Promevo. So we are a Google premier partner that sells, services, and builds Google products. We are a hundred percent Google focused and we specialize in ChromeOS, Google Workspace, Gemini, Google Cloud, and we have our own proprietary management tool, gPanel.

Promevo has the best of the best in partners. And we are very excited today to be working with our partner CloudM for today's webinar.

So let's go ahead and get started and meet our presenters.

So joining us from CloudM is James Smith. He is the Head of Product, and our very own Colin McCarthy, the Change Management Leader here at Promevo.

All right, James, I'm going to hand it over to you to tell us about CloudM.

James Smith:

Hey, thanks Hailee, and hello everybody. So CloudM. Okay.

We started in 2008 as a migration company. We've since grown and expanded our offerings into an archive solution, a lot of automation around Google Workspace.

And we're working with over kind of 80 million migrations now in over 107 countries and yeah, very proud to be helping customers make sure their data is managed effectively and, they can adhere to the compliance as they need to.

And thanks for having us today.

Colin McCarthy:

So it's great to be here with you, James.

So why are we here? Why is mastering data retention and compliance so important? And it brings the big question: is it okay just to be using Google Vault?

I know a lot of my colleagues have previously when I've discussed backup and archive policies and practices with them, they will say, oh, I've got Google Vault. Everything is okay.

But Google Vault is not a backup or archival tool. And it even says that in the manual. If you look at the Google Vault help Google say themselves, Vault is not designed to be a backup or archival tool.

Why are our colleagues, why does CloudM see this as an important product and category to be focusing on? And why do we as Promevo talk to our clients and customers about their backup and retention policies?

And I think that all strives because as we know, the value of our company is all based around the data that we have. And we have all seen that the horror stories of companies that have had data either accidentally or maliciously deleted by users or they've succumbed to outside bad actor attacks that have compromised that data and they need to have a backup and archival process.

James, I'd love to hear what, what CloudM was hearing from its clients and customers that, that made them have this product and solution.

James Smith:

Yeah. Thanks Colin. Definitely touching on some of the things you saw there.

So operationally there's a pressure for, certainly, those that operate on the Google admin side to be able to support the business quickly and effectively with the recovery of data. And that covers, the two areas you discussed really, which is, backup. So we're really restoring data from a live user that's still operating, working within the business, but for whatever reason listing some of the ones you have there, can't find the data they need.

Often there's a time pressure against these. And they were looking for a solution to be able to quickly restore that, that data.

And then likewise, we saw a change of a shift in the market with cost savings where customers were becoming, certainly larger ones as they were growing, and they increase the cost increase for SaaS. They noticed the sort of license sprawl, as it's sometimes called, was happening.

And essentially, they were keeping user accounts in a sort of a suspended state or what's now known as an archive user state in some cases. And that was increasing pressures and costs against Google Workspace and managing it.

So that we saw customers certainly looking for solutions that could address both of these. And obviously we use the migration technology we've got to dovetail into that space where you'll be able to provide solutions that meet those needs.

Colin McCarthy:

Yeah. And I've, from talking to some of my colleagues and friends in the industry, they also come under a lot of requirements with compliance.

And there's I find there's a sense of maturity the organizations also get to or admins get to in their career where they start thinking about doing a backup solution or an archival solution as companies grow.

As you mentioned, the cost impact of suspended licenses that accounts for all that can happen inside organizations when they do grow and you get the change over of employees, which is natural. You need to maintain access to that previous account, and a lot of that could be can be down to compliance.

Is that what you're seeing is as well or hearing from customers?

James Smith:

100%. Yes. And I guess you know, we've seen incidents across the globe where data loss has been quite public. And I think that's raised awareness in a lot of organizations and a lot of, bodies that sort of define the standards for operating.

And so that obviously overlaps with cloud computing as well. And areas like Google Workspace and how you're going to recover from data loss as a business has an impact on you know an economy.

So it's become a very hot topic in terms of directives being released into kind of government to ensure that approaches are in place to make sure data can be recovered and businesses continue to operate I think that's really the driver is their recovery to you know that you can continue working as a business.

Colin McCarthy:

Yes, business continuity plans, disaster recovery plans should, and always did, have backup as being part of that.

And I do think that, um, potentially with the shift to SaaS, that there has been that belief that, oh, I don't have on premise servers, I don't have file servers. I'm not responsible for the data because I'm not managing those file servers. I don't need a backup. Everything we do is in the cloud.

Regardless of what SaaS platform you're on, I think there could be that belief that, oh, it's in, it's everything's in the cloud. It's all available. We're not going to have any problems. We don't have to have a backup.

But as you say, you can, there have been a lot of public stories of data being lost and we do have these regulatory compliances. I know for finance there's legal requirements for holding on to documents for X number of years.

I've also seen clients write in their MSA their own retention policy for when how long files should be kept. Certainly when you have staff being changed over, and I know in the EU and in the UK, there's actually government compliance rules that companies need to adhere to.

James Smith:

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think the public cloud is highly available, comes with amazing features. You know that all the ability to deploy new features across the globe and take advantage of those in a business. We will see the benefits of collaboration. The power we have in Docs is just amazing. And it's shown us a completely different way of working and transforming a business.

And I think that's still there. That's, that's amazing. But we still, as businesses, we're still data owners. We still need to understand how we're managing that data. Yes, it's in a different location now in terms of a different technical solution, but we want all the advantages of the collaboration that you can get.

But we've still got to be mindful of applying the right process and policies and systems and controls on top of the data that we have. It's, yeah, it's hopefully it's more unlikely to happen, but when it does, it still has just a big impact and just, we're helping businesses deal with that really and mitigate that risk.

Colin McCarthy:

Yes. Yeah. It is all about mitigating risk. It's almost like an insurance policy that, that you hope you're never going to have to call upon. But having a robust operational backup and archival process is that insurance policy that everybody needs.

Talking about operational, what are some of the practical operations that we need to consider when looking at deploying a tool like the CloudM Backup and Archival user service?

James Smith:

Yeah, I think one of the first things is it needs to be secure and needs to be manageable and controllable by the customer. And, we deal with that with making the application available through Google's own marketplace.

So the customer has this trusted marketplace where everything's vetted by Google and they control what's installed into their domain. They have full visibility of all the APIs that are being accessed in order to deliver the services from the application.

And, with our solution, they can pick the Google Cloud storage buckets that they're using within their own cloud infrastructure. They can wrap their own identity and access management controls around it to make sure the right people have got the right access levels that they should have.

And I think that's the sort of foundational stuff, like after an organization recognizes they want to do something to manage this risk, they're typically looking at solutions and how they adhere to those requirements first.

And then I think for me, if we get past that stage, sometimes there's an overlap. It's like functional requirements.

We talked to a lot of administrators and kind of risk managers, security type roles in businesses where what they're looking at is the sort of situations they will encounter in their business. How do I recover a data? How do I know my data is successfully being backed up? How do I know it's successfully being archived?

So that when I come to use it in that moment when it, that something's happened, then I'm confident that, I've practiced it. I've tried it. I've tested it. I'm getting like no errors from the application. So they want to see evidence of that, which is you know, perfectly the right thing to do.

So we'll often spend time working with those roles, demonstrating to them how the product meets those requirements really. And that gives them then the trust to sign off the application at a usability level, kind of functional level, security level.

And then we'll often move into things like scalability where certainly for large organizations, they're interested in, okay, I've got a workforce of 50,000 staff. How do I deploy this out with potentially different retention policies, different types of backup policies?

So we'll go through how that scales and we can scale very simply to a small number of users and right up to tens of thousands of users. So it's working through that. And really at this point, we're starting to deliver a sort of an implementation plan for them to help them understand how best to configure and deploy at scale.

Yeah, security, functionality, implementation, the sort of hot topics when we're talking to customers,

Colin McCarthy:

Right, yeah. So it's, and it's as easy as just deploying it within the Google Workspace marketplace, just as they would any other application.

They don't have to manage the software themselves or do patch management, manage the infrastructure like we used to do back in the day when we had you know, a dedicated team managing the backup and there would be separate servers that would have the backup service, and there would be tapes that would have to be rotated and logs that would have to be checked.

It really is just a one click almost deployment.

James Smith:

Yeah, simply that. Yeah. We're both customers and I guess, software providers are benefiting from Google and that kind of global scale that we mentioned. So not only is it a sort of a powerful collaboration tool, but it gives us access to these wonderful marketplaces, both as a customer to have choice and the sort of applications that we can install and enhance our productivity and enhance how we manage those productivity tools.

But also as a supplier, we can obviously publish applications, go through the governance process to get them on boarded into Google's marketplace. And we can then again surface that nice and easily to to any of our customers anywhere in the world. So yeah, real advantages again of having public cloud and using Google Workspace.

It's a good tool and it's a good choice. Yeah. And, gives you access to these type of add ons that enable you to enhance how you're managing your data.

Colin McCarthy:

And with it being built in and connected in like any other marketplace app, it can be integrated into part of the platform.

Lifecycle management of a user with joiners and leavers, so that any new account that gets created would have a suitable retention policy or backup policy applied to it. And then if somebody was to leave, then the that archive snapshot would be able to run on that account.

James Smith:

Yeah, 100%. We're keen on however a user is created in Google Workspace through that be like an identity platform where they're authenticated and created and that synchronizes into Google.

As soon as they appear in that Google platform, you can start applying either for automated policies or manual policies, the retention that you need for both backup and archive to those users. Should a user who's active, as I said before, lose a piece of information, they can retrieve it. But if somebody exits the business, as you said there, Colin, then we'll, automated process will archive their data off to safe storage and for recovery.

So yeah, it needs to dovetail into that joiners, movers, levers process, just to make sure that the appropriate users are being captured in the policies, the appropriate policies have been applied. We've changed jobs in businesses and we want to make sure As I move around the business, not only are my permissions adjusted, but the policies that are applicable to me and the data that I'm going to be working on, they need to adapt as well.

So, we make sure that those dynamically adapt based on the roles that you do change to. And then if you exit the business, be that at retirement, if you're lucky enough, or, whether you choose to move somewhere else, then we want to make sure that data is archived off into, again, a safe storage and for the right period of time, right?

Some roles need a shorter retention period than others. And again, that flexibility can be delivered in the tool, and it's down to customers to ask those questions, understand their policies and just make sure those are applied in the tool.

Colin McCarthy:

Yeah. And thinking about this reminds me of some of the complexity that we used to have in the past with doing restores and using the backup process.

It's been almost probably 15 years since I've had to do a backup in a traditional file server from a tape or an archived backup. If you're trying to restore a file at a moment of time, it could be a nightmare trying to work out which process to run.

As a lot of these platforms, we hope we never have to touch. And it is almost like an insurance policy. We do know that files have to be restored due to an accidental or a malicious deletion. Cause those things do happen. And we've all heard stories about, files being accidentally deleted.

I know when Google Drive file stream came out and people were starting to view You know, their Google Drive on their windows or their Mac laptop. And they were like, oh, I gotta, clear up some space on my laptop. I'm going to delete everything that's in this G drive that's on my computer, not realizing that it was the Google Drive and they accidentally delete a whole bunch of files and it's difficult to restore them. You'd have to do the restore.

The one thing I've always, when I was an admin, advocated was, was regular tests and restores and build that into a monthly, weekly, quarterly, war gaming exercise thinking or assuming that a file had been deleted, getting your support team to go into the platform, making sure they can access it. Knowing how to do those discoveries, finding a folder or an email, the file, and then being able to do the correct restore.

How important is it for companies to do that and how easy is the the UI for people to be able to experience that?

James Smith:

The UI has to be an experience of using the tool has to be great.

We do customer experience surveys from within the tool, like most products these days, and we're really keen to keep in touch with what customers think and continually making improvements.

So the product has to be easy to use and obviously we'll get sight of that in a bit, but I think what's also interesting is you touch on area there around good practices within businesses based on the context of that business.

For me, that's where partners like yourself, Promevo, really stand out. So what it's about is helping advise customers, whether it's through customer success or whether it's through pre sales, it's like advising them on what's appropriate for your business. So it's not just about buying a tool at all is a toolkit for doing things, but what's appropriate for your business.

Sometimes if it's new, if new to a business, actually they need guidance on what are the good questions to ask? How do I need to think about implementing this tool? The last thing we want is the tool to be great, but actually the way in which it was implemented didn't necessarily capture all the data or keep it for the right amount of time.

So, you know, we provide customer success ourselves, but we find partners often, close to their customers and, best place to really understand their business and advise accordingly. So it's a good partnership.

Colin McCarthy:

Yeah, that is 100 percent true. It's not just enough to buy a product or solution. It has to be correctly deployed. It does need, periodic revision.

So it is good to work with a partner. To help you think through that to work with you with the deployment draw on their experience from other clients and experiences that they have to suggest how you can do your own backup process that's or archival process that's right for your business and your structure and needs.

Or be there as a good sounding board for you to talk through how you think, you're going to tackle it. And have that experienced person, say, yes, this seems like a viable process that you're going to have and help You implement it.

So should we cut away now, run VT, as they said back in the day and show people what the UI looks like with a sample restore.

James Smith:

Yeah. Let's take a look at backup in, in, in action. Sounds good.

CloudM Backup Video:

This video outlines the steps required to restore specific items using cloud and backup. We will walk through restoring a specific file folder and mail item. To restore a specific email, start by navigating to the Backup section. Choose Item Restoration, then select the user for whom you'd like to restore the email.

Make sure you're on the Mail tab and then search for the item you want to restore. Once you've found it, simply check the box next to the item and click the Restore Selected button located in the top right corner. Select the timestamp for the backup you wish to restore from. Select the account you want to restore the item to.

By default, this will be the account that was backed up. You can also add a custom label to the mail item if needed. Review your selected items, and once you're ready, click the Restore button to start the process. You'll then be directed to the Restoration Status area, where you can monitor the progress of the restoration.

Once the restoration is complete, you'll find the restored item in Gmail. If you applied a custom label, the item will appear under that label within the CloudM Restorations folder, with the existing structure preserved. Restoring files and folders follows a similar process. Start by navigating back to the item restoration area and select the user for whom you want to restore items.

Make sure the Drive tab is selected this time. To restore the contents of a folder, find the folder and select it on the right side. If you prefer to restore a specific file, simply select that file instead. Once you've made your selection, click the Restore Selected button in the top right corner. Choose the timestamp for the backup you wish to restore from and specify which account to restore to.

You can also enter a custom folder name for the restored item. When you're satisfied with your selections, click the Restore button. You'll then be directed to the Restoration Status area, where you can monitor the progress of that user's restoration. Once the restoration is complete, You'll find the restored content in Google Drive within the CloudM restorations folder.

If you provided a custom folder name, the restoration will appear within that folder. Thank you for watching. We hope this video helps you get started with CloudM backup.

Colin McCarthy:

It was great to see in that video how clean the UI was, how easy it is to search for your users, find the files. Have the dashboard to see the, the backups the, the restores that are happening in process.

And, and, it looked like it was going to be a very easy process for any of your support team to have access to and, when required, go through that process. You mentioned, or we mentioned at the start about some of the cost impacts of looking at an archival and backup solution, certainly with archival, with the changes to how the Former, I don't know what they call it Former Vault license or Former Vault.

James Smith:

Oh, Former Vault, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Colin McCarthy:

The VFE was previously done in Google Workspace. And one of the cost management processes that the people have to be aware of is those suspended users. And I've heard of colleagues of mine who have joined organizations as a Google Workspace admin, only to find on that tenant there's 500 suspended accounts for employees who had been there over the last five or so years, each one of those suspended licenses being a full Google Workspace license, which obviously has quite a, an increase in cost, where if we focus on costs, they can't, the retention of those accounts can be done in a lot more efficient way.

How are your clients managing some of this from what you're seeing and hearing from them?

James Smith:

You touched on the VFE one that I guess that started a lot of the initial kind of requirements from customers on cost, certainly with licensing, I think those that will remember it. There was a, an alternative SKU from Google that came with no cost, but typically was aimed at large organizations that kind of translated into what's now called archived user SKU.

Essentially, customers would use this as an element of switch a license over at the end of an employee's journey at the company, and that would essentially become their new license. And what we found was that the cost of AU was not something that the customer forecast for, and the prices that they were being shown were a lot higher than what CloudM themselves charged for an archiving solution.

So there was a, there was an immediate kind of cost saving for our customers there that were having to move over to archive user from VFE. And obviously customers that have just had archive user and never had the privileges of a kind of free VFE license. So I've just experienced in those real term costs in a sense of archive user has a price to it.

And if we're competitive and provide the right functionality for the customer within our product, then essentially we can replace that archive user strategy if you like for when a customer a member of staff exits the business and our offboarding process can, you know, archive that data into a customer's Google Cloud storage.

Alternatively, we do offer an automation where actually you can offboard a member of staff. You want to secure the account. So there's a lot of functionality you can automate there.

And actually when it comes to things like data retention, you can leave the data in an archive user account and just simply use the automation to flip the license SKU at the end of the step so that you just ensure, again, manual savings.

And this is the sort of second thread of it, really. So there's a license element to cost savings, but there's that operational element of people, can be expensive and they've got other projects. You want to focus them on within a business and actually performing up to 30 tasks, we sometimes find in businesses.

And I think we're running at around 35 different automations we can perform within our offboarding process that actually customers don't want somebody sat there just running through these simple tasks.

And we all know humans make mistakes. We will do it. Is we want to make sure we've got a standard policy applied globally, rolled out across the company.

When somebody leaves, everything's done exactly the same way, fully logged, fully auditable. And if there are any actual issues, then they're spotted and highlighted through alerts and reporting.

So, as you said, there's a maturity to a business, however, whether that's through somebody has an issue and discovers they need to do something about it or whether it's the size of the business or just somebody joins the business or researches this area and discovers there's a, a smarter way of working really.

Colin McCarthy:

Yeah, everything should be automated in this day and age.

The deprovisioning process cannot be left up to a manual checklist because staff tend to leave through their own process of finding other work or leaving a business, and they always leave at six o'clock on a Friday or five o'clock on a Friday, and the IT team does generally not want to be staying around and going through a check sheet of 30 odd tasks that they need to do.

I think I counted it once to deprovision or secure an account in Google Workspace, transfer their documents, remove access to all of the files and applications they have, transfer their calendars. To do it manually in the Google Admin panel was like 50 clicks.

So all of that does need to be automated, should be automated. And it's great to hear the, with the CloudM backup and archival tool, you can automate it so that it switches over from being a backup of the user to an archive of the user so that it is repeatable and consistent rather than you say, a manual process.

And I don't think it does get to that point of maturity that organizations get to with size or an admin's experience inside the industry the company should be looking at doing that.

And I don't think, I don't think it can be overlooked at any size doing that automations, but also as we're thinking about data retention and compliance, I don't think you have to be a company of 100 people or 50 people or 1,000 people to be thinking about how your data is backed up.

You could be a 10 person company, a 5 person company, or a sole trader. I think there's a when we look at these costs and the associated costs with retaining these accounts, I think there's a big cost of inaction, as opposed to the associated costs with taking on these services and running them.

As I said before, backup and archival of accounts is an insurance policy. We all have an insurance policy. We hope we never have to call on our insurance policy to pay out or use their services just the same way that you have a backup service. It's something that everybody needs to have inside their business.

What would be the best way to get started? Now that people have understood the importance of data retention and compliance, Hailee, what should they do?

Hailee Zapata:

Yeah. So like I mentioned earlier, you guys are going to receive this entire deck. And we, if you're interested in learning more, we have links and emails here that will be sent out that you can get ahold of us.

I did want to highlight a few things that CloudM and Promevo do. So, we will always provide you with a comprehensive approach. We have a competitive offer that we will work with you and then consistency. You will always get that from us. CloudM's ends top notch products partnered with Promevo's services is your best support.

So if you want to contact us, we hope that you'll check out our websites and there's more information and links to our latest blog as well, if you want to learn more on Archive and Backup.

Also on the right hand side, you'll see a list of other upcoming webinars, including our gPanel Office Hours series. gPanel is our own proprietary Workspace management tool.

So if you're interested in Google Workspace, signing up for our gPanel Office Hours is definitely a must.

So thanks for joining. We are now going to go to questions for Colin and James. And I know we had a couple in the chat. So, our first question is what format is the data stored in for backup and archived users?

James Smith:

Yeah, thanks, Brad. Good question. Common question.

We store email messages in EML format, so open standards there, and we store documents, depends on the documents. Obviously, Google have their own proprietary Docs, Slides Sheets, so we actually convert those over to the xlsx, docx equivalents.

Things like PDFs come across as they are. And for things like forms that you've got in Google, we'll actually extract some of the data into zip files around the actual form itself, and then we'll extract the links sheet to an xlsx file as well. So yeah, we'll always convert it to a readable format that's stored in the GCS bucket.

Hailee Zapata:

Okay. And how is this different from the Archive User Workspace subscription?

James Smith:

Yeah, obviously Archive User subscription keeps everything within Google, retains the sort of standard Google formatting, and the price point will be different. Other than that, essentially, it's very similar. We'll store the data in a different location, so obviously within your Google Cloud Storage.

So you can take advantage of the kind of cheaper licensing for ourselves and the the storage there and manage your identity around it. But very similar in a sense, but we we just offer the ability to reduce your costs and manage that data retention in a much more sustainable cost effective way, really, in GCS.

Hailee Zapata:

Okay. And just to play off of that, Colin, I know I mentioned Promevo has like consistency and a comprehensive approach. Can you just talk for a quick second on how Promevo handles all of that?

Colin McCarthy:

Obviously partnering with Promevo, you get a dedicated client success manager who can help, help you navigate the licensing within Google Workspace, talk to you about some of the pros and the cons of using the archive user SKU within Google Workspace. Partner with CloudM, talk to James and his colleagues about CloudM backup and archival SKU.

You also get access to, our dedicated support team to provide a sort of a third line support for yourselves when you're, if you have any Google Workspace issues and there's obviously a lot of other professional services that we can do.

I spent a lot of time doing Gemini for Workspace Workshops. We can help with the deployment and the evaluation of Gemini. Plus a whole host of other professional services that myself and the customer engineers could do for you.

Hailee Zapata:

Okay, amazing. So James, what is the timeline for calendar backup being released?

We did get a couple questions on that.

James Smith:

Yeah, timeline and calendar, right? Good things.

I guess I can't give a specific date. I'll say weeks, right? So it's yeah, it's imminent.

So watch this space and keep in touch with Promevo through their kind of regular comms and obviously monitor the CloudM site and, yeah, there'll be some communications.

Hailee Zapata:

Amazing. Okay, that's all of our comment questions, but we did get some more questions. They're emailed into us ahead of time that people want to know about.

So here's a few. How is an eDiscovery performed on an archive user?

James Smith:

Okay, so essentially we have different search criteria that you can use within the the search panel.

Essentially, you can use that to retrieve the kind of information you need. And you can either then restore that directly from within the the carbon product back into Google for further eDiscovery.

Or you can obviously return that information straight back to the user based on what that investigation is for the, what you need the eDiscovery for, whether it's a legal kind of investigation or whether it's just a kind of a, rediscovery back to a particular business unit.

Colin McCarthy:

Yeah, I know we talked about Google Vault at the start. One of the primary reasons for companies to be, to have their live data retention rules and access to eDiscovery is for those compliance and legal holds that get performed. And for any backup solution that's going to be used often that the same functionality needs to be able to be done on that backed up archival data.

In the worst case that you do have a request from HR or the legal team to uncover some data. I know it could be an incredibly time consuming process to try and perform those discoveries with without the correct search functionality within the platforms.

James Smith:

Yeah, eDiscovery interestingly is a very important area for discussing with ourselves and with your partner, Promevo.

I think based on the types of searches and how you use them and how often you use them can dictate whether the sort of archive user SKU or a third party product like CloudM is best placed.

So there are certain scenarios when one is better over the other. And often we can advise on that when we're discussing that with customers.

So there's not always a one size fits all. Sometimes you need to actually have a blend of solutions within a business based on the requirements.

Hailee Zapata:

Okay. A little more on that. So with Google Vault, can you provide permissions for select users to perform eDiscovery searches?

James Smith:

Yeah, there's role based access over the product as we call it, which means we've got very granular permissions inside of the product.

So you can grant out that to as many roles as you like. So essentially you create a role, call it whatever you like, and then you can associate the right level of permissions, whether that's view access into certain parts of the product or actual actions like doing a search and restoring.

So yeah, that, that can all be managed by the central admin team or the person that's responsible for building out those roles and permissions.

Hailee Zapata:

Okay, so I think you answered this a little bit, but do those permissions and CloudM Archive tool allow for granular access rights? And, like, how granular does it go?

James Smith:

So if you mean granular access rights in terms of what you can do in the application? Yeah, so if you get oh, yeah I mean they can go right down to whether or not you can edit a specific field on a user's profile.

But we tend to have, we have some predefined roles for common scenarios like security teams, IT admin teams, what we call a normal user for managing their own profile and performing searches within the product.

But there's over a hundred permissions that you can get very granular and there's some inheritance. So sometimes you'll need one permission. Plus another permission to actually make use of it.

But yeah, it's depends on how you want to break that out across your teams. Typically we see first line, second line, third line type support. Often they can be a security team that want to have access into view things like dashboards, reporting logs.

And in some cases with things like signature. We'll associate permissions out to the marketing team or a brand or web team, and they'll be responsible for designing signatures, managing the signature library, and setting up scheduled signatures for things like events.

So yeah, it can be very granular and fits into lots of roles across a business. It's one of the powerful and essential parts of the tool, really.

Hailee Zapata:

Okay. So each department can have their own set of like access rights?

James Smith:

Yeah. In some businesses, like Veolia is one we work with, obviously they're a global company, so they have global admin teams distributed across the world.

So actually they have permissions to different OUs and different teams. So one team can't manage another team's OU in another part of the world. So yeah, you can be, very granular.

It's, it's powerful and really flexible for organizations at scale, but it's also nice and flexible just to be able to give a colleague access, even if you're a small business, rather than having to be a one man and try and do it all yourself, or you can pass it out to your colleague and give them permissions to do a limited set of functions.

Colin McCarthy:

Yeah, it's so important in today's world of least privilege that all of these admin platforms that we rely on actually do have those very granular access rights so that you can, as you say, delegate roles, restrict access, give people the tools that they need to do their function certainly with access to archive data, doing eDiscoveries, you would, you'd want to give that to your legal team or HR investigators.

You wouldn't want to give them the ability to, overstep their mark or accidentally make changes to the platform. You just want them to have the ability to view data as opposed to make any changes to your backup process.

James Smith:

Yeah, and it's important for the confidence of the team.

You want to know that the area in the product you've got access to is, you've got permissions that you're allowed. You don't want the confusion of I've got access to the signature tool when I'm working in legal. That part of the product is hidden and they can't administer it. So it's nice and simple for them.

And when you're talking about training a team in the tool and getting them used to it, it's a lot simpler because you can just share with them within the tool itself, just the areas that they need to access and see. Makes it easier to deploy in terms of a change management.

Hailee Zapata:

Yeah, that's amazing. It feels like it fits into every company, no matter how like the size, how many users, how many departments. That's great.

James Smith:

Yeah. Customers are always throwing this like curveballs, right? So they'll come up with a process or a team or something. And, as a, an agile company, we're always adding in like different permissions and having to come up with a different work to different scenarios in businesses.

And that's part of the fun of actually being a software producer and making great solutions that help customers achieve what they want.

Colin McCarthy:

Yeah, it is, Google Workspace and all of these other SaaS tools that we work with do allow for flexibility for IT admins and companies to mold them and adapt them for their own usage.

And I've always found that very helpful, interesting, and exciting talking to different clients to see, how they are tackling things in a slightly different way. Everybody has a slightly different set up. It's great that it does give them that flexibility and CloudM archive tool fits into that as well, almost seamlessly, from the Google marketplace.

James Smith:

Yeah, they're both very useful tools, how they fit to your business. It will be different to another person's business, but I'm confident that, whether it's permissions, the use of backup policies, archive policies, the offboarding steps that you might need in your process, you'll be able to adjust the toolkit, if you like, of CloudM to meet your requirements and, get the best use out of it for your need.

Hailee Zapata:

That's amazing. We are going to do one more question. So are there plans to have the ability to tag specific file formats or label files for backup rather than users completely?

James Smith:

We've investigated this. So we're doing user research. So we have UX designers and product managers, and they're always speaking to customers and partners, but for us, they're the same really.

But yeah, so it's not, we haven't made a final decision on it. We are investigating it and if there's anyone out there that is interested in this feature, we'd be more than happy via Promevo to get in contact get a meeting talk to you about it. It helps us shape it up correctly in our development process so that we don't implement features that are low value when people are using it. We've got a lot of requests coming in.

So yeah, it's something we've looked at looking at. So if there's anyone out there that's really interested in this, then I'll please get in contact with the team at Promevo and we can connect up and discuss.

Colin McCarthy:

Yeah. The ability to label files within Google Drive is, has been underutilized since it's being launched, but with the new AI security SKU and the Gemini Enterprise SKU, where you get the ability to use AI to train the model to automatically label your file, label your Google Drive files, really does supercharge that part of Google Drive and on what you can do with those labels. Certainly with DLP data loss prevention rules.

So any admin should be looking at the AI security SKU or Gemini Enterprise and testing out how they can use automatic AI labeling. Because then, as you say, if there are plans to add label a certain label being backed up or having a different retention that makes the whole process just so seamless when AI is powering the labeling of those files.

James Smith:

Yeah, 100%. And I know when it first was released without the AI element, so we talked to businesses around this and, one of their issues was really the whole implementation of how do you get end users to start classifying. And then there's the schema that you need to design against the types of data that you're going to have in a business. And so actually the limitation was that sort of practical implementation.

So AI helping with that. Certainly for us, that's a conversation and the research we've been doing around if that is adopted and we see that kind of tagging happening across files and actually those if you like sensitivity levels as an example, then actually just want to back up a certain type of label across a certain set of users.

That's the investigation we've been having so far, and we'll continue to have, and that helps us shape the best way in which we can deliver something quickly that's going to have the most value.

Colin McCarthy:

Yeah, very true.

Hailee Zapata:

That's great. It sounds like it's always growing. But that's it for today. Thank you everyone for joining us.

We really appreciate it. Thank you, James and Colin, for taking the time to walk us through everything. Happy Tuesday. We hope you all have a great week.

James Smith:

Thanks Hailee. Thanks everybody.

Colin McCarthy:

Thanks, James. Thank you.