This announcement was made at Google Cloud Next ‘19 in San Francisco. Check out Next OnAir to tune into the livestream or watch session recordings following the event.

What’s changing 

G Suite’s globally distributed cloud infrastructure reduces latency and protects data with geo redundancy. Therefore, most organizations choose not to geo-restrict their data. However, some organizations have preferences around where their data is stored at rest. To serve this need, last July, we introduced data regions allowing you to choose the regions where covered G Suite data at rest is stored - globally distributed, US or Europe. We’re now launching enhancements to data regions with two key updates:

  • Coverage for Backups: Backup data for covered Apps is now included. 
  • Coverage for additional products: Forms’ and new Sites’ covered data is now included. 


Who’s impacted 

Admins only

The expanded product and data coverage will not alter any previous settings you may have configured. Your existing settings will be applied to the additional apps and data types covered with this release. As with the prior release, there is no impact to your end users.

Why you’d use it 

Data regions has been built keeping in mind the requirements of a geographically dispersed organization. With data regions, you can create as many organizational unit-specific regions as you want with no minimum seat requirements. Your end users don’t have to deal with downtime and continue to enjoy full edit capabilities of all files, even during a data move. Additionally, when file ownership changes happen, or users switch OUs, covered data is moved dynamically according to your settings.

How to get started 




Additional details 

To ensure visibility into your data move progress, there will be a new ‘Backups’ tab in the data regions dashboard (Admin console > Dashboards). The tab shows a breakdown of the Backup data move progress for each of the covered products. See image below for an example of the new dashboard view.


Helpful links 




Availability 

Rollout details



G Suite editions 

  • Available to G Suite Business, G Suite Enterprise, G Suite Enterprise for Education and Drive Enterprise 
  • Not available to G Suite Basic, G Suite for Education, and G Suite for Nonprofits 


On/off by default?

  • For customers already using data regions, expanded product and data type coverage will automatically be supported according to the pre-established settings. 
  • For customers not using data regions, it will be OFF by default and can be enabled on the Company Profile page at individual OU levels.



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