Google launches Workspace for Government
By
Susan Miller
A set of offerings specifically for government customers, Google Workspace for Government features pricing options to meet the specific needs and constraints of government customers.
Google announced Google Workspace for Government, an updated suite of productivity tools for federal, state and local agencies.
Google Workspace, until recently known as G Suite, provides a full slate of office applications and productivity and collaboration tools, from email, calendar and spreadsheets to chat and videoconferencing.
Google Workspace for Government, which is a set of offerings specifically for the public sector, features pricing options to meet the specific needs and constraints of government customers, the company said. Users can access Workspace as the full suite or just use the services they need to complement their existing tools.
It also includes to support compliance with data location, portability and archiving requirements, company officials said in a blog post. Google Workspace for Government has been authorized at the moderate level by the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, and the company is in the process of applying for approval at the high level as well. Also on the product road map is compliance with Criminal Justice Information Services, Todd Schroeder, Google Cloud’s director of public sector digital strategy, said in a recorded Q&A session.
Workspace for Government aims to “provide the right amount of compliance capabilities in the workspace product at the right price point. That makes this valuable to any given customer regardless really of this size of that government agency or institution” Schroeder said.
A recent agreement between Google Cloud and the Department of Energy gives DOE employees and contractors across the national labs and field sites access to the entire catalog of Google Cloud Platform services. These include Google Cloud Storage, BigQuery, AutoML, Cloud GPUs and TPUs, Google Kubernetes Engine and TensorFlow as well as Google Workspace.
In West Virginia, a multi-year deal ensures full access to enterprise-level Google Workspace capabilities for all 22,000 state employees and access to Google’s data loss prevention and access control services. Advanced video meeting capabilities will allow officials to host or join secure video meetings with up to 250 participants, broadcast live streams to as many as 100,000 viewers and record and save meetings to Google Drive.
“At the heartbeat of all of this is the necessity to connect how government organizations work internally with how they satisfy their mission processing and requirements, connecting them to the tools and the technologies they really use to connect mission outcomes,” Schroeder said.
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