Office 365 and Google Apps: pricing and licensing

Office-365-and-Google-Apps-pricing-and-licensing

Different companies have different needs. Office 365 provides you with different levels of support according to the plan you select. The cloud solution is much more secure than keeping your data locally but there are other security issues you may come across. To avoid them you shoud perform Office 365 cloud backup. In this article I will compare Office 365 and Google Apps pricing models and also tell you how to perform Office 365 cloud backup to enhance you cloud security.

Office 365 licences

  • Office 365 for Professionals and Small Businesses: For companies with up to 25 workers and no special IT staff.
  • Office 365 for Midsized Businesses: Has four levels to meet different companies’ needs.
  • Office 365 for Kiosk Workers: Low-cost, online-only plans are best suited for delivering corporate email and collaboration tools to those who have never used them in the past.
  • Office 365 for Education: Plans for schools and colleges.

Office 365 has created these plans according to the market investigation. They understand that each type of business has its own needs and they set up their pricing policies accordingly.

Google has a no such specific plans and supports a unique approach to any company. Google Apps give only one solution for all types of customers that includes 3 main features: messages, collaboration and basic productivity tools.

You may be delighted to see such low costs for Google Apps, but in fact what you see is only the top of the iceberg. You pay about $50 per user per year and this is what you pay only for Google apps. The costs for additional applications that provide your cloud security are not included. And this is not to mention archiving, single sign-on, enterprise video conferencing tools etc.

Office 365 includes all these features. Take a look at just some of the hidden costs of Google Apps:

  • You have no single-sign-on feature with GApps and you have to use third-party tools for that.
  • Google Apps require you to use third-party solutions for security and auditing to see who has access to which documents.
  • If you migrate your data from Office 365 to Google and vice versa be ready that not all files will be transferred as smoothly as you would hope and you will need additional tools for that.
  • Google Apps interface can be a little bit confusing for those who got used to Microsoft through all these year and it may take time and money for education.

Office 365 cloud backup

Office 365 is a secure cloud solution. It is much safe to keep you data in the cloud than to store it on a local server. But new technologies mean new threats to your corporate data.

If the users share the files between each other one of them may delete some important data. How much money would it take you to get it back?

There is a beautiful solution that can help you to save money and nerves. You can perform Office 365 cloud backup with applications like Upsafe. You will always have a reserve copy of your data in another cloud and it would take you just a few clicks of a mouse to get your files and emails back.