- Accidental deletion
- Third-party risks
- Lost/stolen devices
- Ransomware attacks
- Drive for Desktop vulnerabilities
- Data overwrites
- Saas outages
- Application integrations
- Native retention limitations
- Migration data loss
- Compliance
- Employee exits
- SysCloud backup
Article at a glance
- User Errors: Accidental or intentional deletions can lead to permanent data loss.
Third-Party Risks: Permissions granted to third-party apps can result in data breaches.
- Device Theft: Lost or stolen devices can expose sensitive data to unauthorized access.
- Ransomware: Attacks can encrypt data, demanding ransom. Backups enable recovery without paying.
- Overwrites: Collaboration features can lead to accidental data overwrites.
- Outages: Google outages can disrupt access to vital business data.
- Migration Risks: Data migration can result in loss or corruption.
- Compliance: Legal requirements demand historical data retention, which is better managed with a backup.
- Employee Exits: Deleting accounts post-exit can result in data loss.
What is the solution?
Don’t take our word for it; here are two extracts from their terms of service:
Google won’t be responsible for the following liabilities:
- loss of profits, revenues, business opportunities, goodwill, or anticipated savings
- indirect or consequential loss
You’re responsible for what you do with your Google Account, including taking reasonable steps to keep your Google Account secure.
Why back up Google Workspace?
1. Accidental/intentional deletion of data by users
According to Verizon’s 2024 Data Breach Investigations report, 68% of data breaches over the prior year involved a non-malicious human element.
Creating space on the Drive: Whenever users on Google Workspace get a notification for running out of space, they often try to create space by deleting files that seem less important. However, this practice is risky.
Removing duplicates of data: Google Workspace has the collaborative feature of allowing multiple users to work simultaneously on the same file. Although this feature is quite useful, sometimes people create different versions and copies of the same file, eventually losing track of the original version! In such cases, users might accidentally delete the original file while trying to remove duplicates.
A reliable backup solution for Google Workspace ensures that files can be recovered easily even if mistakenly deleted.
2. Threats from third-party apps
The SaaS-to-SaaS Access Report by Adaptive Shield reveals that organizations using Google Workspace with 10,000 to 20,000 users had an average of 13,913 third-party apps connected to their environment.
89% of these apps requested permissions classified as medium or high-risk.
- The report also highlights that organizations struggle to track the number of connected apps or assess the level of risk they introduce.
- Many of these risky applications were either used only once or by a small group of employees.
- However, even these infrequently used or dormant apps retain significant permissions, creating potential vulnerabilities that could lead to the compromise or breach of your Google Workspace data.
3. Risks from lost or stolen devices
According to Forrester Research’s State of Data Security report, lost or stolen devices account for 17 percent of data breach incidents.
4. Ransomware attacks
On June 18, 2024, CDK Global, a leading technology provider to the automotive industry, was hit by a ransomware attack that severely disrupted its operations.
- The company had to take its systems offline to contain the damage, which caused widespread service outages for its clients.
- This attack cost car dealerships more than $1 billion collectively, according to an estimate from Anderson Economic Group, an East Lansing, Mich., consulting firm.
SysCloud backup for Google Workspace scans the data being backed up for the presence of ransomware. Admins can take control of infected files and delete them to prevent ransomware propagation. In the unlikely event of ransomware encryption, admins can recover data from a safe backup snapshot. Learn more
5. Vulnerabilities of Drive for Desktop
6. Employee overwriting data
7. Saas outages and shutdown
In August 2024, Google experienced a significant outage affecting multiple services, including Gmail and Google Drive, causing widespread disruption for users. During such outages, access to critical business data stored on Google Workspace can be temporarily lost, hindering productivity and leading to potential missed opportunities. In cases of prolonged or unexpected shutdowns, the data stored in the cloud could be at risk of permanent loss.
8. Accidental overwriting due to application integrations
9. Neither Google Takeout nor Google Vault is enough
Google Takeout is a simple tool in Google Workspace that lets users download their data stored in Google's services. However, it should not be used as a backup alternative since it does not provide the security and restoration capabilities of a backup solution.
- You cannot download data in shared folders even if there are files inside the folder created by you.
- Recovery is going to be a tedious process: In case a situation comes where you have to recover all your Google Workspace data, chances are that you’ll find different file types distributed across multiple .zip files. You will have to manually sort these and put them in order.
Click here for more reasons why Google Takeout should not be used as a backup alternative.
Google Vault is an archiving tool that retains user data stored in Google Workspace regardless of end-user actions, including permanent deletions.
To know more about the difference between Google Vault and a backup solution, read this article.
10. Data loss during migration
11. Legal compliance and litigation
12. Employee exits
SysCloud backup for Google Workspace
Given the risk of data loss due to the reasons mentioned above and the limitations of native Google Workspace retention tools, it is crucial to have a third-party cloud backup solution in place for Google Workspace. Third-party cloud backup applications like SysCloud are reliable options to back up and restore your Google Workspace data effortlessly.
SysCloud backup for Google Workspace backs up all essential Google apps on a secure cloud. SysCloud uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide a fully automated cloud-to-cloud backup and restore.
With SysCloud, administrators can easily recover from accidental deletions and ransomware attacks, and spot compliance gaps in the backup archives.
Learn more about SysCloud backup for Google Workspace.