Changes to Google Storage at Kean Universtiy
Google announced significant changes to its storage policy that ends unlimited storage for the academic community. This change is a result of the industry moving away from “unlimited storage” offerings for many cloud-based services. The changes from Google eliminate the free and unlimited storage offering they have provided to the K-12 and higher education communities for nearly a decade.
Google will set storage limits on academic Workspace tenants and Kean University is highly impacted as we use over 630TB of the 148TB Google has allotted to the University based on our institution’s size.
How is Kean University responding to this change?
Because of the extensive use of Google Workspace, the University has entered an agreement for the Google Workspace for Education Plus edition. This will include many new and enhanced features, and ensure the continued availability of Google's collaboration and communication tools as a campus-wide enterprise service.
Between now and May 31st, 2023, we will migrate to a managed storage model in which faculty, staff, students, and alumni will have limits on the space available across their Google Workspace services.
Why are individual storage limits (quotas) being applied?
As previously mentioned, Google is implementing storage limits at the institutional level for all their educational customers with the understanding that any institution that does not adhere to its allotted storage limits will result in a loss of functionality.
Because of these storage limits, Kean University will implement a 20GB storage limit for faculty, staff, and student accounts. This limit may need to be adjusted in the future based on usage trends; however, the storage limit is consistent with many of our peer institutions. Visit Google Workspace Account Guidelines for more information.
While your account remains over the quota, your ability to send and receive email will not be impacted; however, items such as the following will be impacted:
- Saving to Google Drive
- Creating & editing documents
- Downloading & saving attachments from Google Email to Google Drive
Implementing these storage limits will have minimal effect on the vast majority of university faculty, staff, and students. However, approximately 5% of Google Workspace users storing large volumes of data will be impacted by the new storage limits. Outreach efforts have begun to determine the best path forward for each individual case.
What types of data are impacted by this change?
Any data stored in your Kean University Google account is impacted. Your storage amount includes Gmail, Google Drive (documents, sheets, slides, forms, etc.), Google Shared Drives, and Google Photos.
We ask all users to thoroughly review their current storage utilization and delete any unnecessary files. Please note that as with all University computing resources, Google Drive may not be used in violation of the Digital Copyright and DMCA requirements.
Transition Support
Our goal is to ensure the entire campus community is informed and supported during this transition, which will be completed in the second half of 2023.
The Office of Computer and Information Services (OCIS) will facilitate continued, effective use of Google Workspace now and in the future, across a wide variety of collaboration and communication scenarios. Our goals are as follows:
- Communicating to the campus community about the impacts and timelines for the changes coming to Google Workspace.
- Identifying those accounts associated with large amounts of storage, analyzing this usage, and developing appropriate mitigation/migration options.
- Developing and implementing a detailed storage management strategy consistent with the collaborative capabilities of Google Workspace, specifically for Shared Drives.
Support
If you need assistance with reducing your Google storage consumption contact googlestoragehelp@kean.edu, should you need technical support contact the OCIS Help Desk.