Google Workspace Tenancy Consolidation - To do, or not to do, that is the question.

[EwokCarrier]

My MAT is using Google Workspace across all of its schools, we are currently all seperate tenancies.

 

Consolidating these tenancies into one will be a fairly large job which will require a lot of planning, however I can't really see any reason to consolidate them into one.

 

Has anyone gone through this process and if you have, what were your driving forces behind it?

[Zoom7000]

My MAT is using Google Workspace across all of its schools, we are currently all seperate tenancies.

 

Consolidating these tenancies into one will be a fairly large job which will require a lot of planning, however I can't really see any reason to consolidate them into one.

 

Has anyone gone through this process and if you have, what were your driving forces behind it?

 

Something I would also bear in mind is that when the hard storage limits come in (currently, this July) every Google Workspace domain will be limited to 100TB of storage. As an example, if you currently have 9 schools in your Trust, each with their own Google Workspace domain, each school will get 100TB, totally 900TB. If you consolidate all of the schools into just 1 Google Workspace domain, everyone will have to share just 100TB.

 

Google did initially say that they would make special considerations for any "districts" (it was an American announcement, but I would presume this would cover large MATs in the UK too) with over 20,000 students, but I'm not sure exactly what this looks like.

 

The only issue and it is a big issue, is if the Trust wants to start using Gmail with the Trust domain (e.g. [email protected]). Then I presume you would have to consolidate the domains, at the cost of the storage. Though there may be other ways round that (e.g. unique domains per school etc).

 

Just some food for thought. I'm looking at a very similar discussion at my Trust as we are merging with another Trust.

Edited March 11, 2022 by Zoom7000

[Ditto]

Interesting point on storage. Any idea what sort of range of current storage figures are for established Google Workspace Education users. 100TB used to be an enormous amount of space. With my DP hat on, perhaps there are benefits to restricting total storage. I think there is a tendency with limitless storage to just keep everything for ever, which sort of makes retention policy enforcement trickier.

[Zoom7000]

Interesting point on storage. Any idea what sort of range of current storage figures are for established Google Workspace Education users. 100TB used to be an enormous amount of space. With my DP hat on, perhaps there are benefits to restricting total storage. I think there is a tendency with limitless storage to just keep everything for ever, which sort of makes retention policy enforcement trickier.

 

This is the current question that everyone is asking. It's not clear how much storage Google Docs/Sheets/Slides/Forms etc currently uses. Hence, it's harder to judge what would be sufficient. If you go to the Admin Console and then Reporting > Highlights > What storage is being used? You can see the totals. Just be aware that the big figure it gives you is just My Drive files and doesn't show Shared Drive storage. You have to click View Details to see Shared Drives storage, which is usually a lot more.

 

I agree with the retention problem. We're looking at using Google Vault to delete any files in My Drives that haven't been modified in over 3 years. And the same for Gmail. Deleting all emails older the 3 years.