Google wants to be more than just a search and online advertising kingpin. To get enterprise and small business customers to embrace its cloud-based computing products and services, it must first demonstrate that it can deliver the level of security and functionality they’ve come to expect for leading installed software vendors.
As eSecurity Planet reports, Google’s now opening up about its security practices to alleviate any concerns IT managers have and to differentiate itself from other cloud and on-premise providers.
For starters, Google says it now stores customer data in fragments across multiple servers and across multiple data centers to increase reliability and provide a more secure environment than by storing all data on a single server where a single breach could have major security consequences.
Also, when Google needs to issue a patch, it does so across identical server stacks to keep users updated.
It also employs data replication across disparate data centers to ensure availability and facilitate disaster recovery.
Google continues to make gains in its push to win over business and enterprise customers to its cloud-based services and applications, but the search giant still only holds a tiny fraction of the enterprise market while Microsoft’s Office suite dominates corporate desktops and the vast majority of companies are sticking primarily with traditional on-premise data centers.
To be fair to Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), the company is a relative newcomer in this area and the enterprise sales cycle is notoriously long. But one of the issues all cloud providers face, from Google to Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) to Zoho and others, is security. Companies want to know the files and information they’re entrusting to a third-party are secure.
To that end, Google revealed more of the infrastructure and cloud security practices in a post at its enterprise blog site that acknowledges the security issues IT departments face on a regular basis.