Google Workspace Goes All In On Shadow IT
Google Workspace goes all in on shadow IT
It used to be called G Suite, but now Google has released a new version of Workspace, the company's productivity tool. A new, free plan called "Google Workspace Essentials" is meant to get more businesses to use the platform by giving them access to most of its productivity tools, except for Gmail.
Before, if you wanted to use Workspace with a non-Google email address, you had to sign up for the $6/month/user Business Starter account after a 14-day free trial. As long as the premium plan doesn't change, all you need to do now is sign up with your work email address. There is no need to have a credit card.
The new free plan is almost the same as the old Business Starter plan, except that it comes with 15 GB of storage space (down from 30). You can also use Google Meet with up to 100 people for up to 60 minutes per call. You can also use Spaces and Chat to talk about your coworkers. There are also the usual tools, such as the ones that you use every day: Sheets, Slides, and Docs.
You already have a work email, which makes sense because it would be hard to send emails from Gmail with your work address, which would cause a lot of problems.
It's just that there is a small problem with this. Each Essentials Starter team account can only have 25 people on it. However, in the same company, there can be a lot of different team accounts that work together. If you work for a bigger company, someone on your team will need to set up an account and then invite other team members.
As Google says in its announcement, "With Essentials Starter, we're making it easy for employees to choose their own productivity tools and bring modern collaboration to work." This move is paving the way for a new era of "shadow IT." In this case, if IT doesn't make the decision, the people who work there will.
This also raises a lot of questions about how data is managed and how it is kept safe.
"Google Workspace Essentials Starter was made to make it easy for people or teams to start using Google Workspace at work," a Google official told me when I asked about this. If you pay for a Google Workspace plan, you'll get more granular IT controls and more security features, like the ability to invite people to join your team.
This is likely to make any big company that doesn't already have a paid Workspace account do so right away so that its employees can't make their own.
