Good news for teachers and students out there who have ‘Gone Google’ – Google Apps for Education users will receive a substantial storage boost from 30GB to Unlimited through the company’s ‘Drive for Education‘:
Drive for Education will be available to all Google Apps for Education customers at no charge and will include:
- Unlimited storage: No more worrying about how much space you have left or about which user needs more gigabytes. Drive for Education supports individual files up to 5TB in size and will be available in coming weeks.
- Vault: Google Apps Vault, our solution for search and discovery for compliance needs, will be coming free to all Apps for Education users by the end of the year.
- Enhanced Auditing: Reporting and auditing tools and an Audit API easily let you see the activity of a file, are also on the way.
All of this comes with the same world-class security that protects all Drive users. Every file uploaded to Google Drive is encrypted, not only from your device to Google and in transit between Google data centers, but also at rest on Google servers.
I wonder how our desktop computers are going to be able to reconcile such a large amount of synced data over time though. And if our hard drives aren’t at a similar capacity then we will definitely need some solid bandwidth to support a consistent cloud connection.
It’s all well and good having 1TB of cloud storage space in services like Dropbox, but personally speaking, it’s taken me the better part of a week to sync my changes up to the cloud on normal speed broadband. So while larger storage prices drop down to the near non-existent, where’s our matching bandwidth?