With over 5 million organizations using Google Apps (yes it’s that many), the market is demanding enterprise-class solutions for administration and management of the Google productivity suite. Yeah sure you can have a decent word processor with with collaboration features, even a spreadsheet and presentation program. But if you want to play with the big boys you need management and administration built around it. Only then can Google Apps really rival MS Office for the mainstream market.
Beyond that though, Google Apps is only part of the story. There is the whole “Google Infrastructure”. One of Google’s aims seems to be to bring Google like capability to IT teams the world over. This is one of the aims with Kubernetes, as well as CoreOS Tectonic (see our article in ContainerJournal on this).
So what is holding you back? There are 5 areas that you need to focus on according to a recent ebook by JumpCloud:
- SECURITY AND COMPLIANCE
- SSO
- DEVICES AND SERVERS
- WIFI
- DIRECTORY SERVICES
The directory services can be added to the mix via integration with JumpCloud’s Directory-as-a-Service (DaaS). This gives Google Apps an equivalent to Microsoft’s AD except in the cloud and available as a service. Think about it, you don’t just set up a user to use Google Apps, you want them to use your entire infrastructure where appropriate. Also you don’t want to be setting up users one at a time in an enterprise setting. Both of these use cases are handled by a directory-as-a-service solution like JumpClouds’.
Two keys to effective directory management using Google infrastructure are authentication protocols and device management. Directory-as-a-Service can deal with both of these issues if done correctly. Once you have bridged this gap, it opens up a wide range of uses and interactions with the rest of your Google infrastructure, other infrastructure, your users and your devices.
The book by JumpCloud featuring DevOps.com’s own Ericka Chickowski does a great job of explaining this along with how to overcome some of the security issues that using Google infrastructure can present. You can download the book below.
There is also a good infographic with some metrics around this topic here.
