Google Drive's Impact on Business

To: Mark Anderson, CTO
From: Nikita Patel, Sr. Analyst

Date: June 2, 2014

Subject: Google Drive’s impact on our business - Memorandum

Mark,

As per our discussion last Tuesday, the corporate email system has limitations of storage, attachment size and distribution of large files like PowerPoint presentations, detailed documents & creative contents; hence the use of Google Drive will be of significant advantage to our organization. The files stored on Google drive can be easily shared/ reviewed/ edited via various modes of devices (computers, smart phones, tablets, I-Pads etc) which will result in substantial saving of time and resources to finalize the documents/projects. It will also support our paperless vision for 2016 & ratify the green environment cause that we have enrolled our organization with.

The need to address manual workarounds & spreadsheet dependent processes is getting a top priority while the regulatory mandates are continuing to steer the majority of investment dollars, firms are allocating more budget towards operational restructuring initiatives & in this scenario moving our platform to Google Drive will provide a relatively smooth path to modernization of our legacy IT systems & have the following beneficial impact within our business processes:

Economical & Cost Saving: Cloud computing eliminates a firm’s need for costly networking equipment and the space in which to hold all of it. This will help our business to grow its revenues and profits through greater efficiency, increased time savings and an enhanced customer experience. We may start with 15 GB of free space and can upgrade to the different available plans - 100GB for $1.99/month, 1TB for $9.99/month, 10TB for $99.99/month, 20TB for $199.99/month, $ 30TB for $299.99/month and store everything other than the sensitive client information. This will help us reduce the storage costs by approx. 70%.

Multiple access & simultaneous collaboration: Each user controls their data which can be reviewed and/or edited (up to 50 people at a time) via computers, laptops, smart phones, tablets etc. from anywhere with internet access. Results a significant saving of time and resources to validate and finalize the projects.

Quick search: Google Drive enables to quickly search within the document files & also the scanned text in uploaded images.

Backup system: The data can be retrieved if in case of office computer failure. Google drive keeps history of files going back to 30 days or more and keeps a trash folder for deleted files. Hence, if files are mistakenly deleted, it can be retrieved.

To conduct a sample test, I reviewed the tool with one of our fixed income team for a month & observed that using Google Drive actually helped not only to reduce storage costs but also to increase the morale within the team members as they could provide the deliverables of daily fund accounting from virtually anywhere considering the kind of deadline driven work they are involved in. I touched base with the lead product manager of ‘Axys’ software tool that the fund accounting team currently uses and it was mentioned that they are going to add a new feature of sharing the data from the tool directly onto the secured Google Drive. This feature once released will have a positive impact in terms of reducing resources and time & giving a big boost to the overall operations of new product releases & quick strategic decisions of the composition of the new product. No doubt the sensitive corporate communications are of utmost importance, however many of the issues that cause an IT department like ours to push back on cloud computing such as risk, compliance, corporate governance, security, and resiliency are solvable problems, even though they require a bit of proactive planning however the implementation of the Drive environment will surely be beneficial in the coming future.