Google Workspace – Removing a license via a Patronum policy

We’re always listening to our customers and partners, and this week we received a request to provide the ability to remove Google Workspace licenses via our recently added license management section. Today we’re happy to release that functionality to our customers.

Cloud Identity License

To understand why you’d want to remove or switch licenses you first need to understand the different licenses you can add to your Google Workspace domain. Typically your Google Workspace will have one primary license type for all your Google Workspace accounts, those being Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, or one of the Enterprise licenses. There are also additional license types that you can give to your users, and that is Cloud Identity licenses, either Free or Premium.

Cloud Identity Free allows an administrator to manage the identity without giving the account all the Google Workspace services such as Gmail, Google Calendar. However, these users can access Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Keep and Google Meet.

Save money on Google Workspace licensing

Patronum is great for saving you money when it comes to licensing creep. With Patronum you can configure a policy to correctly offboard a Google Workspace account, transferring files, contacts, calendars etc as part of the process. Patronum can also allocate an Archive User license as part of an offboarding process. And now, you can also switch from a Google Workspace license to a Cloud Identity Free license saving you even more.

But why would you want to switch licenses?

One of the benefits of switching from a Google Workspace license to a Cloud Identity Free license, apart from the obvious, is the audit and visibility within Google Drive you get. If you delete a user from Google Workspace you also remove the user from the Google Drive Activity section, this means that users are no longer able to see who edited a file and when, instead of showing the individual’s name, it just displays “unknown”. Switching the Google Workspace license of ex-employees to Cloud Identity means that you’re no longer paying for their license, but you still have full visibility of what they did.

Obviously, as part of the offboarding policy, you’d want to change the users’ password, and reset their login cookies so they can no longer access the account. But that’s all possible within Patronum too.