How Google Workspace Can Reduce Technical Debt And Business Spending

During the pandemic, companies reacted quickly to support the needs of employees working from home by rolling out solutions such as Zoom, Slack, third party Device Management and other tools. This investment for the short term, without considering the long term, has impacted efficiency, productivity and cost.

What is technical debt?

Technical debt occurs when businesses spend on technology – such as legacy IT and other tools – that you don’t actually need, or which have been deployed in isolation with little long-term thinking. This is a huge problem, especially for businesses focused on driving innovation and transformation. 

Technical debt ranks as the third biggest obstacle to digital transformation, with 86% of business leaders
reporting that their organisation has been impacted by technical debt over the past 12 months. 

Many businesses have turned to using Google to help drive the innovation they’re looking for, but whether you are completely new to Google Workspace, or have “Gone Google” and not yet managed to move on from certain legacy solutions, there will likely be areas of your business that are draining your costs and resources. Wherever you are on your Google journey, we have the tools to help reduce the need, associated costs, admin overhead, and complexity of third party tools by making full use of native Workspace.

What to look out for and where Google Workspace can help

Some areas where you may be overspending on third party tools that native Google Workspace features can help with include:

• Video conferencing and instant messaging
• Managing mobile devices and endpoints
• Monitoring Security events
• Secure email and email compliance 
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

How can Google Workspace help?

Google Workspace is more than just mail and documents, it has many built-in administration and security features that can allow you to displace legacy solutions. Naturally this reduces the direct costs but it also reduces complexity which has a cost benefit as well. 

Device Management: If you use a third party solution to manage your mobile devices (phones and tablets) then you can manage them via the Google Admin console instead. If you’re using Workspace then you already have this capability built-in, so why pay twice for similar functionality?

Mail Filtering: You may still be using a mail filtering gateway or service that was in place before you moved to Workspace. That was probably the simple and pragmatic option at the time. But Workspace has powerful mail filtering and DLP rules built-in so maybe it’s worth considering if it’s now time to remove the old gateway.

Video Conferencing: Another area we commonly see technical debt is in video conferencing systems. It’s quite surprising how many organisations are paying for systems like Zoom when they have Meet available through their Workspace licences. Google has been rolling out integration with meeting room hardware from Cisco and Zoom so you can even start to switch over to Meet without having to replace expensive hardware.

ChromeOS Flex: If you’re about to retire some older laptops or PCs because they won’t be able to handle the upgrade to Windows 11, then consider giving them a new lease of life by installing ChromeOS Flex. This will turn them into the ideal device for modern cloud-based productivity applications and won’t cost you a penny.

Get started in a few simple steps

Identify

Explore which third party solutions your business is using today, and why were they implemented.

Assess

Which native Google functions, apps and services can be used in place of third party solutions? What would be the associated savings?

Deploy

Implement the Google solution and technical configuration to meet your requirements.

Manage Change

Help users and IT staff adapt easily to the new solutions and reap the benefits quickly.