Introducing Archived Licenses for Google Workspace: Unlock Massive Savings on Licensing & Data Retention

Archived Licenses in Spanning helps businesses unlock massive savings on Google Workspace licensing and data retention. Read the blog to learn more.

Google Workspace, with its all-in-one suite of storage and collaboration tools, has become a foundational tool for organizations worldwide. The SaaS application offers businesses the flexibility and scalability needed to thrive in today’s hybrid and remote environments, where users demand seamless access and real-time collaboration.

However, with this extensive flexibility comes the responsibility of comprehensively securing business-critical data. SaaS applications like Google Workspace operate within a shared responsibility model, where Google manages the platform’s infrastructure security while customers bear responsibility for their data protection, retention and compliance requirements. This division of responsibility means that businesses must ensure their data is protected and retained according to regulatory standards, even when employees leave or change roles.

Recognizing these needs, Spanning has introduced an all-new powerful feature: Archived Licenses. This innovation empowers Google Workspace customers to retain business-critical data of inactive and deactivated accounts, ensuring that essential information remains accessible without overpaying for licenses. Spanning’s Archived Licenses are a timely solution for companies aiming to manage their data optimally and cost-effectively within the Google Workspace ecosystem.

Archived Licenses: Retain the data, save on licenses

The Archived Licenses feature in Spanning Backup for Google Workspace offers a streamlined approach to managing data for inactive and deactivated accounts. This feature enables Google Workspace administrators to retain crucial data from these accounts while eliminating the need for ongoing backups. It preserves only the data that was previously backed up from inactive and deactivated accounts, helping organizations meet data retention mandates without incurring the costs of full-featured licensing by Google or by Spanning Backup.

This feature translates to significant savings on SaaS data retention costs for businesses. When an organization converts an active license to an archived one, it frees up that active license for a new user, which is particularly beneficial in transitional periods. For instance, let’s say a long-time employee named Laura, Director of Finance, is retiring from an organization. The business can then archive Laura’s account to retain all the critical financial data. This action immediately frees up an active license for their replacement without the need for an additional license purchase. The Archived Licenses feature enables companies to handle such transitions smoothly, ensuring continuity without the financial burden of excess licensing costs.

On top of significant cost savings, the capability to archive licenses is valuable for organizations to meet their compliance and regulatory standards, where data of former employees may need to be accessible for years. Archived Licenses help organizations meet these requirements while also aligning with cyber insurance stipulations, ensuring that critical data is available when needed without incurring unnecessary expenses.

Beyond Google Vault: The essential need for Archived Licenses

If you’re wondering whether Google’s native tool, Google Vault, can serve this purpose, it’s essential to understand its limitations. Although Google Vault is a powerful archiving and eDiscovery tool that helps retain, search and export data for legal and compliance purposes, it falls short on many backup and data retention essentials. Let’s take a look at some of those:

• Vault’s data coverage is limited, excluding certain Google services like Calendar, Contacts, Keep and Currents. Businesses relying on Vault alone would lack coverage across these tools, missing critical data during retention and recovery.
• Vault also lacks automated data restoration capabilities, which means that data can only be exported, not automatically restored to its original state within Google Workspace. This gap creates a complex, manual process for restoring lost data.
• Another limitation is Vault’s inability to offer point-in-time recovery, a critical feature in dedicated backup solutions like Spanning that allows data to be restored to a specific state before an incident like accidental deletion, encryption or corruption.
• Vault’s data retention also depends on active accounts; if a user’s account is deleted, all associated data — including any retained by Vault — is removed from Google’s systems. This dependency makes Vault unsuitable for long-term data preservation when employees leave.
• Vault’s data export process is really complex, especially for large data volumes, making data recovery tedious and inefficient.

Archiving meets automation: Simplify licensing, enhance security and cut costs

By combining Archived Licenses with Spanning’s other powerful feature, Automated License Assignment by Google Organizational Units or Groups, admins can dramatically reduce their workload and optimize license management across the organization. This holds especially true for organizations experiencing frequent user changes, such as high turnover or seasonal workforces.

For example, consider a school district with 20,000 users, including faculty, students and staff. The user turnover rate will be so high that it will be difficult for the admins to streamline license management, compromising the district’s security and IT budget. However, with Automated License Assignment, admins can automatically assign backup licenses to users based on their Google OUs or Groups memberships, ensuring data protection for every user. Meanwhile, admins can also easily archive and free up licenses for incoming users, avoiding unnecessary expenses.

This approach is similarly beneficial for businesses with seasonal workers, such as retail chains or customer support centers, where employee turnover is very high.

Spanning Backup: Data protection made affordable, simple and reliable

Spanning’s Archived Licenses for Google Workspace offer organizations an invaluable solution for reducing licensing costs and meeting compliance standards. By allowing businesses to retain critical data without the need for continuous backups on inactive accounts, Archived Licenses deliver both financial savings and regulatory peace of mind, ensuring that essential information is accessible and protected.

Archived Licenses are just one of the many ways Spanning is making Google Workspace data protection affordable, simple and reliable. With more robust features like automated daily backups, dark web monitoring, and rapid, point-in-time recovery, Spanning continues to support businesses in securing their business-critical data seamlessly. Discover how Spanning Backup can transform your Google Workspace data protection strategy — get started with a demo today.