All Google Apps for Education users will get free unlimited Google Drive storage. Your move Microsoft!
In what may be the company’s biggest assault on the education market yet, Google has announced Drive for Education — a free, unlimited version of Google Drive for schools, colleges, and universities. Drive for Education will be available to all organisations using Google Apps for Education and will allow their users unlimited Google Drive storage at no extra cost. Features include:
- Unlimited storage: No more worrying about how much space you have left or about which user needs more gigabytes. Drive for Education supports individual files up to 5TB in size and will be available in coming weeks.
- Vault: Google Apps Vault, our solution for search and discovery for compliance needs, will be coming free to all Apps for Education users by the end of the year.
- Enhanced Auditing: Reporting and auditing tools and an Audit API easily let you see the activity of a file, are also on the way.
Until now if schools wanted more storage than the standard 30GB it had to be purchased at the standard consumer price, this move takes away yet another concern that schools may have when using Google’s cloud services.
The addition of Google Vault, which was previously a paid add on, is yet another option in the administrator’s tool-belt for managing compliance across their organisation. Vault turns Google Drive and Gmail into a manageable file system rather than the data black-hole it was previously.
On the Google Apps for Education blog, Google makes the point that “Every file uploaded to Google Drive is encrypted, not only from your device to Google and in transit between Google data centers, but also at rest on Google servers. As always, the data that schools and students put into our systems is theirs.”
It’s great to see Google being so aggressive on this front, and making a concerted effort to answer concerns that schools have using cloud services. How Microsoft respond with their Office 365 product will be interesting to see.
I can’t understand why it’s taken so long.
This is simply clever marketing, because in the long run it will make money for Google. On the basis of “Get ‘Em While They’re Young”, they will generate a userbase of impressionable young people, whilst they are still in Education.
They become loyal to what they know and if they want to keep what they have accumulated in this time, they will have to pay to retain that amount of storage space.
Hi Darren,
You’re completely correct, it’s all marketing. My bet is it makes minimal difference to Google’s storage whether schools have 30GB or infinite storage. Ultimately it’s all thin provisioned and the total sum will change very little. It’s great for school’s though!
Karl