Growing Businesses Need Good Computer Hardware
If you are a growing business, and you’re finding that your technology costs are spiralling out of control as you grow and scale a mid-market business, well, we’re going to be talking about ways that you can optimize your hardware costs to get more value out of your business as you’re working with the Google workspace ecosystem.
Computer hardware is very essential in every workplace. It can affect the efficiency and speed of your overall productivity. Choosing the right hardware to go with your business is a pivotal decision that every business owner should do. Today, let me share with you the great hardware that can boost up your organisation’s performance.
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Transcript
Now, many businesses as they grow, end up taking advantage of hardware leasing or end up spending a lot of capital expenditure on hardware for the business as it grows. And, you know, we find ourselves buying monitors and computers and the latest whiz-bang machines for the business and for your employees. Now, in this blog, I’d like to share some of the benefits of considering using Chrome hardware instead of Macs or PCs in the business; some of the pitfalls that businesses start to fall into when they’re considering chrome hardware; and some of the benefits and advantages of working with is pretty amazing tech when you’re rolling it out in a business.
Now, if you’re a small or medium-sized business owner, maybe you’ve got 10 employees or less, it might be compelling for you to buy one or two chrome machines and try them out and see how they are with your team and potentially then roll them out to the rest of your employees. But if you’re a larger organization, there are specific benefits around hardware lifecycle, and ensuring that the manageability and the policies of each piece of hardware that you have is something that can be broadly managed across a base. And you start to think about the hardware lifecycle of different pieces of hardware, how long they last, you know, what’s the interoperability, what’s the upgradability? And all these questions, we’re going to try and answer as we talk about Chrome hardware.
Advantages of Chrome Hardware and Google Workspace Ecosystem
Big Benefit in Cost
Now one of the most obvious advantages of the chrome ecosystem is the big benefit in cost. That is because chrome machines don’t have all the latest processes that are needed. They don’t need crazy amounts of RAM or storage, because most of their operations and heavy lifting is done online.
And the other great thing about Chrome hardware is because it’s Linux based. It’s a little bit less of a hardware and processor footprint than a normal computer would need. Now, some of the other advantages of being able to connect the chrome hardware to your Google Workspace ecosystem. And I’m going to talk a little bit about how some of the policies are really helpful there. But really, the main difference that it comes down to is the cost of maintenance and the cost of support.
Simple Chrome System / Google Workspace Ecosystem
Now, with a Mac or a PC, a lot of time is spent on updates and rolling out software. And then you need to worry about things like antivirus, password protection, or directory services. Whereas with Chrome, you can manage the policies from the cloud, right from the Google workspace management admin panel. And from there, there isn’t really much day to day management or maintenance needed on any one of these machines. Because there are no real massive threats around viruses or malware on Chrome machines. They’re all locked down with secure enclave technology. This means that the account is fully locked down to your person’s Google account. It’s all encrypted there as well, which is great.
Overall, there’s less needing to kind of like open the machines and tinker with them. Even tinker with the operating system itself. You know, Chrome always carries a second copy of the operating system. Anytime there’s an issue, you can actually just hit a power wash and completely wipe the machine reenroll it. It’s ready to go again with proper Google Workspace management, which means helpdesk can save time on managing the machines.
Fewer Risks of Losing Business Data
From a security perspective, Chrome is absolutely amazing. Now, I mentioned that anyone’s files that are local on a Chromebook connects to someone’s Google account. And so they’re locked down to all of the security available in Google’s account. But from an actual local device perspective, you can run into problems with the risk of losing business data. And that could be something like your employees have files sitting in their My Documents folder, or in a Mac in the Documents folder local to the machine that actually is not backed up to the corporate servers. And you’ve got to start to think about backup software for the machines. But inevitably, you’re going to have someone who doesn’t follow the rules. Or if you haven’t done all of the overhead and actually managing those individual machines.
You know, maybe your machine gets lost, stolen or broken. And you’re potentially going to have a data loss event in the business. Now, one-quarter of the features that Chromebooks have is most of the work is online. So there are no real backups that you need to worry about. Even for files that are on local disks. On the Chromebook, you can set a policy so that any files will automatically synchronize to Google Drive. And the advantage of that is if anything happens to that local machine, it’s all backed up to Google Drive. And you don’t have to pay for extra software. It’s all done automatically via a policy. And there’s no end-user education required because it all just happens as soon as they sign into the account.
Quick Employee Onboarding
The next feature of deciding to work with Chrome OS is more for the Google Workspace management. It is the speed of onboarding – being able to onboard an employee quickly. But getting your team on board and quickly can be as simple as issuing a Google account, putting them in the right group, and then allowing them to sign in to the new device, it’s automatically going to download bookmarks via policy if you’ve set that up in your admin panel. And you can have all kinds of other features and settings enabled on the local computer automatically via cloud policy.
White-Glove IT Service Provider
Now, if you’re working with a white-glove service provider, like a vendor or a consultancy like us, you can even have the machine shipped directly to your employee. So you don’t even have to manage it yourself inside the business and you don’t have to worry about the Google Workspace management. You just call up someone like us and say, hey, I’ve got a new employee starting on Monday, and you set up their email and send them a computer, and a service provider will be able to send that straight to them. And that makes onboarding new employees really simple and reduces the amount of stress and time taken up on your IT team who were actually having to manually implement and manually deploy devices.
Growing Businesses Shift to Google Workspace Ecosystem and management
As you grow, you will probably shift from Mac or PC to Chrome OS. Especially if you’re a business interested in all of the best benefits of the Google workspace ecosystem. This is a deliberate move, it takes planning, and you’re probably not going to find everybody right across your organization ready to adopt Chrome, right from the get-go. It might be one small group of users, it might be a group of VIP test users.
So we’re going to try it out first, before a more broad rollout. Or it might be you know, a number of executives trying out the devices first and seeing if they like the vibe of working with Chrome, it’s always good to start at the top because you can then have that culture filter through to the rest of the team.
Google Workspace Management
But also be mindful that you’re not necessarily going to get 100% penetration with Chrome OS, right across the organization. It may be that only certain user profiles or work profiles are actually going to get the best out of Chrome OS.
Now, don’t let that dishearten you, you can still obviously build those user-profiles and start rolling it out progressively. And what we find is for most organizations that roll out a few Chromebooks very quickly that starts to spread. And they start to consider and even challenge the reasons why you might be using other operating systems across the business. Because of what we know for every business that rolls out Chrome, the support time, and the effort time required to manage the end devices drops dramatically over time very, very quickly.
Let’s Work Together
Interested in learning more about Chrome? Interested in an audit for your organization? Or if you just like to have a chat about Google workspace, and how you might get more value out of the Google Workspace ecosystem for businesses and educational institutions. You can apply for an audit and our team will be in touch soon. If you haven’t already checked out the other videos on our channel. We’ve got heaps of videos on growing and scaling your business technology strategy and ensuring that you get the most out of your investment in Google workspace. Check those out and I look forward to seeing you in another video.