Google Drive Reflection by AJ Varghese
Assignment: Should we adopt Google Drive as a potential opportunity for the company?
Memorandum:
Recently a question has been revisited regarding the adoption of Google Drive as a potential opportunity for our company. The idea has potential as part of current cost cutting initiatives. This issue was discussed previously as a potential opportunity and the current framework supports the previous decision in that we cannot use Google Drive. It is a topic worth revisiting in the future but as the guidance from legal and control hasn't changed in the last six months we cannot move forward with any implementation. The decision is supported in various groups throughout the company but in regards to our specific group, Investment Operations, legal and control teams have advised against the potential pitfalls of the shared capacity with Google Drive. Currently the SOX controls in place do not allow for the restricted information to be on Google Drive. Additionally, the operations teams are highly against the usage of Google Documents in replacement of Microsoft Excel. It is agreed that there are functional similarities but the limitations currently in Google Documents, such as 400,000 cells, is too much of a constraint.
The following article from USA Today highlights some of the impacts of the comparison of Google Docs vs Microsoft and does support the operations teams concerns.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/08/31/review-google-apple-decent-contenders-to-office/2723315/
One excerpt below summarizes the concerns:
"But Google Docs is short on features. It lacks the option to automatically hyphenate words at the end of a line, for instance. Spreadsheets are limited to 400,000 cells, compared with 17 billion for Office. Google Docs also needs a constant Internet connection to run smoothly. An offline app you can enable for Google's Chrome browser is more of a stopgap. There's no spellchecking until you are back online, for instance."
To conclude the Google Drive adoption idea has to be advised against. We will keep it as a potential idea for the future if controls can be enhanced and Google Docs are more in line with Microsoft Excel's current capacity.
Regards,
AJ Varghese
