Google announces Drive for Education: free, unlimited storage & more security

Google today announced Drive for Education, a new service that bolsters Google’s existing Google Apps for Education service with unlimited storage, Google Vault, and audit reporting tools.

Google’s new Drive for Education service offers the same functionality of Drive for Work for free — instead of charging $10 per month per user. Like Drive for Work, Drive for Education will ship with some restrictions; Google currently limits individual uploads to 5TB in size, for example.

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Google says Drive for Education is “rolling out in the coming weeks;” the company tells us it will first offer unlimited storage, then audit reporting tools, then Google Vault (in that order).

In a company blog post, Google emphasized security: “Every file uploaded to Google Drive is encrypted,” Google writes, “not only from your device to Google and in transit between Google data centers, but also at rest on Google servers.” More, from Google:

As always, the data that schools and students put into our systems is theirs. Classroom, which recently launched to Google Apps for Education users, makes using Drive in school even better by automatically organizing all Classroom assignments into Drive folders. And Google Apps for Education remains free to nonprofit educational institutions with no ads or ads-related scanning.

Google touts that “30 million students and educators” are currently using Google Apps for Education — out of the 190 million people using Google Drive globally. And Google clearly intends to lure in new education-centric users with today’s announcement.