G Suite Enterprise for Education rolling out with business-level features for schools

Abner Li | Apr 18 2018 - 9:12 am PT

Earlier this year, Google announced G Suite Enterprise for Education in response to demand from colleges and larger school districts for more advanced tools. Today, this new enterprise-grade version is becoming generally available for institutions in the US.

G Suite for Education remains a free service with Google adding more advanced tools over the coming months. However, the new version is for education organizations “with administrative needs similar to businesses.”

Features include a Security Center with potential threat analysis and actionable insights to protect sensitive data.

With security center tools, IT departments gain insights into how data may be exposed with external file sharing, can see phishing messages targeting users within their organization, and access metrics to demonstrate the organization’s security effectiveness.

Meanwhile, Advanced Mobile Device Management allows for more control over singed-in devices. Other business features coming over include Cloud Search that collate Calendar, Drive, and Gmail, while Hangouts Meet allows for group collaboration.

Introductory bulk pricing for the G Suite Enterprise for Education starts at $2/user/month for faculty and staff, and is free for eligible students. Individual licenses are $4/user/month for faculty and staff and $4/user/month for students. It will be coming soon to more countries outside the United States in the near future.

Meanwhile, in today’s announcement, Google promises that G Suite for Education — which is used by 80 million students and teachers — will continue to be free and add new features like Data Loss Prevention (DLP), security key management and enforcement, and Gmail S/MIME over the next few months.

9to5Google’s Take

Google continues to make inroads into the education market with this Enterprise edition allowing them to justifiably monetize a usually free market. Meanwhile, these advanced features will help them continue to lead over Apple’s cloud services and hardware offerings for schools.

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