Privacy continues to become a bigger and bigger issue in the tech world, and IT managers whose companies use Google Apps can now look to Cloud Sherpas if they’d like a little insurance on that front.  Cloud Sherpas is releasing free and paid versions of an application called SherpaTools.

An official announcement put the spotlight on the paid version, stating, “The new, premium features in SherpaTools help enterprises protect and preserve end user data. Google Apps admins can now delegate access to fellow IT staff, such as help desk workers, without providing the company’s master username and password credentials.”

The announcement also noted, “An equally valuable new, premium feature in SherpaTools involves the ability to quickly and easily preserve the data assets of terminated employees. . . .  With SherpaTools, IT admins can automatically delegate all of a terminated employee’s files to his or her manager or another user in the system.  This saves time and helps to ensure that important data is not lost.”

Still, users of the free version will still get access to Directory Manager, Directory Bot, and other modules as Cloud Sherpas develops them.

All together, then, this represents a very attractive opportunity for IT managers to enhance Google Apps, which is itself becoming more popular every month.