Protecting G Suite Team Drives Data: Are You Leading or Failing?

by Lori Witzel on May 31, 2018

If you’re a G Suite administrator who’s tested your organization’s ability to recover from data loss within the past year, you’re a rare leader. Recent surveys for World Backup Day by a number of different organizations show less than half of respondents consistently test their ability to restore. Without testing restores, your G Suite domains aren’t proven protected, and your organization may be at risk…and if you’ve adopted G Suite Team Drives, the risk can be amplified.

What makes Team Drives different for backup and restore best practices?

By ensuring that an organization, not an individual, “owns” the data in a collaboration Drive, Team Drives reduces the risk that data is unavailable when the creator of a folder or file leaves an organization. Even the best teams, however, may suffer from one of their own being negligent or going rogue. With Team Drives, a user with Full Access — aka Team Drives owner — may accidentally or intentionally delete a folder and all its contents, or a whole Team Drive, and put the entire organization at risk.

What’s not different — and what you also need to protect against — is that Team Drives users can edit files, and users can edit in error. It could be days or weeks before someone realizes that the data is not correct.

Best practices in managing Team Drives data loss risk

Sponsorships Available

Assess your current state of restore readiness. The criteria noted by ISACA here provides some useful guidelines.
Test your restore processes regularly. If you have not tested your ability to restore from a backup within the last six months, plan to test ASAP.
Evaluate solutions that automate accurate restores. If your ability to restore involves manual steps, consider an automated solution that can restore Team Drives from point-in-time backups, like Spanning Backup for G Suite, the top-rated backup solution on the G Suite Marketplace.

What G Suite pros say about Spanning’s Team Drives data protection

If you’re ready to reduce the risk of data loss in Team Drives, recent reviews of Spanning on the G Suite Marketplace should help your evaluation process. Test Spanning to protect your Team Drives, and join these leaders today. For more reviews, visit the G Suite Marketplace.