This morning Google made a couple of significant announcements regards G Suite for Education. First, there is a new G Suite Enterprise for Education which is designed for college and university deployment although K-12 schools can also get it. Second, new security features have been added to all versions of G Suite for Education.
Four security features have been added to the free version of G Suite for Education. Those new features are:
- Gmail and Drive Data Loss Prevention.
- This allows administrators to prevent sharing of certain types of information including student information or anything else that administrators identify as sensitive information.
- Security Key Management and Enforcement.
- This will enable administrators to force users to two-step authentication with physical keys.
- Session Length Controls.
- Administrators can now set limits on how long users can be logged-in for a session before they have to sign-in again.
- Hosted Gmail S/MIME.
- This is a tool for digitally signing and encrypting emails. This is designed to protect against email spoofing.
G Suite Enterprise for Education vs. G Suite for Education
The new enterprise edition comes at a minimum cost of $2/month per faculty/staff member. The current edition of G Suite for Education (not the new enterprise version) is still completely free for schools. A comparison of features is available here.
