Support Stacks: Avoid the “Storage Full” Notification with Storage Insight

Previously, unlimited cloud storage was available to Google for Education institutions. With the coming storage limitations, schools with the Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals or Standard editions will be given a total of 100TB of free storage for Drive, Gmail, and Photos combined across the entire domain. One caveat is Google Vault is not included in the storage limits. 

Once maximum storage capacity is reached, institutions will have to curb their cloud storage usage, clean out unnecessary files, or procure a paid Google Workspace edition. Google Workspace for Education Plus edition holders will receive an additional 20GB of storage per student license, Teaching and Learning Upgrade edition holders will receive an additional 100GB per staff license.

Google for Education anticipates this change in this storage policy to only impact 1% of institutions: mostly large K-12 districts and higher education schools. However, it is still important to review your domain’s data storage hygiene as it may have a future impact on your organization.

Since these limitations go into effect in July 2022, there is ample time for institutions to restructure how they use their cloud storage to proactively avoid any issues. First, schools will want to understand their domain’s current storage usage data, and Google has made it relatively easy to access that Google Workspace information:

One option is to download a list of domain users from the Admin console’s Directory > Users page. With this method, Google Admins will need to include the Total Storage column in the export so that it provides a downloadable list of user information with total storage usage in megabytes.  

Another option is to use the User Accounts report in the Admin console by navigating to Reports > Accounts > Accounts. After getting to the reports, there are a couple of pathways to choose from:

• Apply filters: The Organizational unit and Group filter options at the top provide an opportunity to look at different roles with different sets of criteria. Adding in the Total storage used filter cuts out any light storage users as well as any newly created users.
• Exporting data: If filtering users by Role and Total storage usage gets the total number of entries under the export limit, Google Admins can limit the output to pertinent information for the search by clicking the settings gear in the right of the table and removing any columns from the export which are not needed to evaluate user usage. The downloaded report will queue in the Admin console tasks.
• Using GAM: An alternative is using GAM, an open-source tool that leverages Google’s APIs to gather information in a Google Workspace domain.

To minimize the technical legwork detailed above,  another way for customers to mitigate and monitor their Google Workspace storage is with the Storage Insight stack. It is designed to identify present total usage, top users, and top storage usage cases to help schools more efficiently manage their usage, in less than 10 contracted support hours.

The valuable aspect of this stack is that it takes away the hassle of implementing GAM scripts off of the Google Admin. The stack begins by running GAM scripts to collect data. After extracting that data from the scripts, it generates a Google Drive Usage Dashboard that discloses how much data is being used, the users using the most storage, and the common file types taking up space in the institution’s domain. 

Once the data is analyzed, the CDW Support Team supplies a comprehensive report that consists of the spreadsheets of usage details pulled from the institution and the dashboard and recommendations on storage trends found in the domain. Additionally, remediations such as GAM installation and common support are provided so institutions can take the appropriate action to mitigate occupied storage space issues.

With the coming changes in Google Workspace for Education storage, institutions want to avoid the untimely “Storage Full” notification. Because CDW knows Google and knows education, we are committed to supporting institutions in their EdTech journeys by offering products and services that amplify Google for Education’s suite of teaching and learning tools.