Google is finally bringing this long-desired feature to Workspace Business Starter users, starting September 23, 2024. Shared Drives are a huge benefit to any organization trying to move more of their data to the cloud, but there’s a lot to understand about it, so we’ve broken some of those details down for you:
What is a Shared Drive?
Your shared drives live in your Google Drive, right alongside your own “My Drive” storage. They act as a dedicated space for content owned by a group of users, rather than an individual user. Because they aren’t tethered to one individual’s account, they become much more handy for housing files that are available to entire teams or departments, and for groups which may frequently have team members joining or leaving.
The rules for sharing and accessing files within Shared Drives are a little different too, but Google has a thorough definition here.
Should you be using Shared Drives?
The answer is “yes” almost across the board, but we’ve found they’re especially valuable for:
- Organizations hosting files on physical file servers.
- Organizations with more than 1-2 users.
- Organizations with frequent churn of team members.
Physical servers are expensive to manage, they take up space, and they pose a greater security risk. Moving these files to a Shared Drive in Google Workspace doesn’t cost you anything except the time it takes to migrate your files there and organize them—and if you don’t have time for this, we’re glad to handle that for you as a project.
The downside of Shared Drives for Starter accounts (low storage)
There’s always a catch, huh? While Shared Drive access is an overwhelmingly positive addition for Workspace Business Starter organizations, the greatest negative is that these accounts come with very little total storage per account in your domain.
Your storage is pooled across your organization, meaning that means a company with 10 Starter licenses (30 GB each) will have a pooled storage of 300 GB—and you can now set limits on the storage capacity allowed for each member of your team.
All that is to say, storage goes very quickly these days and to gain the most benefit from Shared Drives (IE, treating them like your own company file server in the cloud), you’d want a lot of storage to work with. That means either purchasing extra licenses (each coming with 30 GB more storage) or upgrading your entire domain to Business Standard, which offers 5 TB for about $6 more per month, per user.
Set up a Shared Drive
If you’re ready to try out Shared Drives, there’s a solid walkthrough from Google on creating Shared Drives for your organization. If your environment is a little more complex, or you just aren’t sure about making these changes yourself, we’re happy to answer any questions and lend you a hand.
Reach out and let us know.
