Google unveils Drive for Education with free, unlimited storage and ‘Classroom’ integration

Google Apps for Education just got a little bit sweeter: In the coming weeks, new and existing customers will have access to Drive for Education, an academic version of its online storage solution.

Drive for Education follows Drive for Work and boasts unlimited storage, support for individual files up to 5TB in size and automatic encryption. “Every file uploaded to Google Drive is encrypted, not only from your device to Google and in transit between Google data centers, but also at rest on Google servers,” Ben Schrom, PM Google Apps for Education said.

The service will be bolstered with Google Apps Vault, a compliance-focused tool for administrators, before the end of the year. Google is also promising a swathe of reporting and auditing tools, as well as an Audit API for tracking files.

Google Apps for Education is free for nonprofit educational institutions and comes with Classroom, a toolset that teachers can use to deliver classroom materials, track assignments and give students feedback. With the new Drive for Education, projects that users create and manage through Classroom will be organised automatically into Google Drive folders. Seamless stuff.

➤ Announcing Drive for Education: The 21st century backpack for students (Google)

Thumbnail image credit: KIMIHIRO HOSHINO/AFP/Getty Images