Enterprise for Education
Google’s G Suite for Education is already popular amongst school IT departments. At the BETT educational technology conference in London this week, Google unveiled a new set of improvements that provide school leaders with more options when managing their technology.
G Suite Enterprise for Education brings some of Google’s existing G Suite Enterprise features down to education customers. These include a mobile device management portal, unified content searching with Cloud Search, the option to create Hangouts meetings with up to 50 participants and a centralised admin Security Center to monitor alerts and insights.
G Suite for Education
Google
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Google said the new suite was created after it received feedback from education organisations that need more advanced control. The new offers similar overall management visibility to the $25 per user per month G Suite Enterprise, while costing schools just $4 per user per month.
“We’ve heard from dozens of large institutions – from private and public colleges and universities, to school districts across the country – that they want access to more advanced tools to meet their technology needs,” said Google. “Whether it’s advanced data and device controls or enterprise-grade communication capabilities, we are excited to be offering an entirely new solution for these customers.”
Security capabilities
According to Google, over 80 million teachers and students now collaborate using G Suite for Education. To help them stay secure, it’s adding additional data loss prevention capabilities to minimise the risk of sharing sensitive data. This functionality will be available to all existing G Suite-enabled schools, not just those on the new Enterprise plan.
Data loss prevention will let admins monitor how school data is accessed. Automated alerts will help to spot potential issues that could cause information to leak outside the organisation. Google’s also adding improved security key management and Gmail encryption to all G Suite Education plans, further hardening the suite against external access.
G Suite for Education
Google
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Google’s currently engaged in a head-to-head competition with Microsoft for dominance in classroom tech. Although the company’s currently seen to be leading, Microsoft has recently stepped up its efforts to recover Windows’ market share.
Despite costing more than G Suite for Education – which is free to schools – Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud platform has strong security and compliance capabilities. By adding advanced management controls to G Suite, Google can address another of Microsoft’s current strengths.
G Suite for Education will gain the new features “in the coming months,” followed by the launch of G Suite Enterprise for Education after its pilot program is completed.
