Posted by Adam Swidler, Senior Manager, Google Apps Team

Editors note: This is the final post in a series that explores the top ten reasons why customers trust Google with their business data. A complete top ten list can be found here.

It’s important for all businesses regardless of size or industry to assess the risk of potential data breaches and take steps to prevent them, especially in the area of information technology. The use of laptops, smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices is increasing as users demand anytime, anywhere access to email and documents. This can increase the risk of a data breach if you’re using traditional applications which store a local copy of the data on the device and the device gets lost or stolen.

Google Apps can help reduce the risk of a data breach by limiting the data that is stored on your devices. When you check email or work on a document in a browser with Google Apps, the data is stored in our data centers, not on your device. That means that if your device gets lost or stolen, there is lower overall risk of a data breach. Similarly, if you collaborate with others in Google Docs, you don’t need to send them a copy of the document. You can enable and disable access to the document with a simple set of sharing controls and your collaborators access it from their browser. The document does not need to be stored locally on their device for them to collaborate on it.

For those times when you want to access Google Apps but you don’t have an Internet connection, we recently released an offline capability for Gmail and for Google Docs. The offline capability does involve some local data storage on devices. The amount of stored data is likely to be smaller as only a limited amount of documents and email are synchronized to the device for offline access. If you decide that this local data storage poses a risk, you can easily disable offline access.

For additional security and data protection information, including a video tour of a Google data center, you can visit our Google Apps security page.