1. Introduction
Nowadays, many established enterprises with thousands of employees struggle to manage their ever-expanding Google Workspace environment. With multiple number of teams onboarding and offboarding weekly, IT admins often find it difficult to track employees’ Google license usage, implement security policies, and identify inactive Google accounts in real time.
When these organizations use SaaS management software, they can effectively manage their Google Workspace environment without any hassle.
This guide helps you understand what effective Google Workspace management is and shows you how to choose the right SaaS platform to support it.
You’ll also learn how CloudFuze Manage helps businesses with intelligent automation, 100% visibility of all SaaS apps (including Google Workspace), and control over Gmail, Docs, Drive, calendar, Google Chat, Google Meet, and more, to run their Google Workspace operations smoothly.
2. What is Google Workspace and Google Workspace Management?
Google Workspace is a suite of cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools that includes Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Calendar, and Meet. It helps businesses manage their communications, create and share files, and streamline business workflows.
Also, Google Workspace integrates AI-powered features to enhance business productivity, automate routine tasks, and support more innovative collaboration across its tools. That’s why Google Workspace is a preferred choice for teams of all sizes.
On the other hand, when you control and optimize the use of these Google Workspace tools across your organization, it is referred to as Google Workspace management.
Managing Google Workspace involves:
- Governing Google Workspace users and groups.
- Optimizing Google Workspace licenses.
- Overseeing Google Workspace third-party app integrations.
- Implementing Google Workspace security controls & compliance monitoring.
- Automating user workflows like employee onboarding and offboarding across Google Workspace.
3. Why Google Workspace Management Is Essential for Businesses?
More companies are embracing a hybrid and remote work culture. Managing Google Workspace manually in a hybrid and remote work environment is often inefficient and error-prone. Therefore, organizations and businesses like yours will need a SaaS management platform to simplify your daily tasks, which are discussed below:
- You can assign and revoke user access automatically to your remote employees instantly.
- You can monitor SaaS license usage across different departments in a single dashboard.
- IT admins can control data access based on roles and scopes for remote and hybrid work setups.
4. Challenges of Manually Optimizing and Managing the Google Workspace Environment
When enterprises manually manage their Google Workspace environment without dedicated SaaS management software, they’ll face the following challenges:
- Onboarding Delays: IT admins manually create Google Workspace accounts for new hires, which delays access to essential tools like Gmail, Drive, and Meet, especially when onboarding happens across different time zones.
- Google Workspace License Overspending: Without any automated tracking, you may miss inactive Google Workspace accounts. This leads finance teams to pay for licenses that are not being used.
- Lack of Visibility into Google Apps User Activity: You rely on basic admin reports that don’t show employees ‘ real-time usage across Gmail, Drive, Docs, or third-party integrations, making it hard to spot issues or optimize Google Workspace usage.
- Inconsistent Compliance and Security Settings Across Google Workspace: You manually apply 2FA, sharing restrictions, and access controls to different users, which can vary across departments and leave gaps in your security posture. Also, you struggle to generate audit-ready reports from Google Workspace to meet SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, ISO 27001, or internal policy requirements.
- Shadow IT Risks: Remote employees often connect unauthorized apps to Google Workspace (like third-party file-sharing tools) without IT approval, due to a lack of visibility over the employees’ SaaS app usage and the inability to detect or block them in time.
5. Benefits of SaaS-Based Google Workspace Management
When you use a SaaS management platform to govern your Google Workspace:
- You can give new hires instant access to the Google Workspace tools they need.
- Automate user access controls and employee deprovisioning across Google Workspace to protect your organization’s sensitive data.
- SaaS management solutions allow you to track your Google Workspace license usage in real-time and eliminate Google Workspace license overspending.
- You can download audit-ready reports and maintain complete visibility into user activity.
- You can also manage Google Workspace alongside HubSpot, Slack, Zoom, and more.
6. Manual Vs SaaS-Based Google Workspace Management
The differences between manual Google Workspace management and a SaaS-based approach are discussed in the table below:
| Aspect | Manual Management | SaaS-Based Management |
|---|---|---|
| Google Workspace User Management | IT Teams manually provision users and manage Google Workspace access, which is a slow process prone to error and administrative backlogs. | Automated tools handle user onboarding and role changes instantly, ensuring every user has the correct permissions from day one. |
| Google Workspace License Management | You manually track Google Workspace licenses in spreadsheets, often leading to over-licensing and wasted SaaS spend on unused Google accounts. | SaaS-based tool tracking gives you a real-time view of Google Workspace license usage, allowing you to reclaim and reallocate licenses to optimize Google Workspace costs. |
| Google Workspace Security & Compliance | Managers lack real-time visibility into suspicious activity and unauthorized apps, making it difficult to implement security policies and prove compliance. | SaaS management platforms monitor for suspicious activity and detect unauthorized third-party apps. Also, it provides instant, audit-ready reports to secure your Google environment from SaaS security risk |
| Google Workspace Cost Optimization | Finance teams rely on reactive, manual reviews to find unused Google Workspace licenses. They often realize it after being paid for unused Google permits. | SaaS management software identifies and reclaims unused Google Workspace licenses, providing data-driven recommendations to cut costs up to 30%. |
| Full Visibility | Companies must manually export data from different dashboards to get a limited view of their Google Workspace usage. | A single dashboard gives you a 360-degree view of all your Google Workspace assets and activity when you use a SaaS management solution. |
7. Tips to Choose the Right Google Workspace Management Platform for Your Organization
- Choose a SaaS management platform that automates user onboarding and offboarding.
- Look for a real-time SaaS license tracking feature in the SaaS-based Google Workspace management tool to avoid paying for unused Google Workspace accounts and optimize your SaaS spend.
- Check whether the SaaS-based solution supports role-based (Super Admin, Admin, and USER) access controls and team-level management to protect the enterprise’s sensitive data.
- Do not forget to select a Google Workspace management tool that offers downloadable, audit-ready reports to simplify compliance with industry standards like GDPR and ISO 27001.
- Select a SaaS management software that integrates with multiple SaaS apps (Microsoft 365, HubSpot, GitHub, and more), not just Google Workspace, for centralized management.
- Make sure to prioritize a tool that supports cost optimization features such as license reclamation and renewal tracking to boost Google Workspace ROI.
- Select a SaaS-based Google Workspace management platform that can scale with your organization’s growth and adapt to future needs..
Our industry-leading SaaS management platform, CloudFuze Manage, checks all these boxes, giving you full control over your Google Workspace environment while supporting your broader SaaS ecosystem.
8. CloudFuze Manage: The Best Google Workspace Management Platform
Our SaaS management platform, CloudFuze Manage, is the ideal solution for managing Google Workspace in remote and hybrid environments. We help large enterprises automate Google Workspace user access, track Google Workspace licenses in real time, and control Google Workspace permissions based on roles in a single dashboard.
IT managers can generate audit-ready reports effortlessly and stay compliant with industrial standards like SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and ISO 27001. With support for multiple SaaS apps (over 50 Apps), our tool lets you manage your entire tech stack from one dashboard.
You can also reclaim unused Google Workspace licenses, monitor Google subscription renewals, and scale as your team scales. CloudFuze Manage gives you full control and full visibility over your SaaS ecosystem and improves your ROI.
9. Steps to Manage Your Google Workspace with CloudFuze’s SaaS Management Platform:
Step 1: Sign in to connect your Google Workspace account with CloudFuze Manage.
Step 2: After connecting your Google Account with CloudFuze Manage, you can find your Google Workspace app under the Applications widget.
Also, you can effortlessly view the Google Workspace App’s category, its number of users, and its total cost in a single dashboard.
Step 3: Hover your mouse over the Google Workspace icon, and the “View Details” icon will appear, which gives you a more precise and in-depth view of your Google Workspace.
Step 4: With our SaaS management app, you can optimize and manage your Google Workspace connected apps, users, licenses, teams, and domains easily.
Step 5: Select the “Connected Apps” labelled icon to view all the SaaS apps (BrowserStack, Dropbox, Reddit, Postman, and more) connected via Gmail. This dashboard shows the corresponding app’s name, its authentication type, and access scopes.
Step 6: Click on the “User Management” labelled icon to discover each user along with their email IDs, access roles (Admin, Super Admin, and User), and activity status.
And there is a workflow icon in the right corner of this dashboard, which helps businesses automate their employee onboarding and offboarding processes across Google Workspace.
Note: To fully understand our automated onboarding and offboarding processes in Google Workspace, check out our blog post: Zero-Touch Onboarding & Offboarding in Google Workspace
Step 7: The “License Management” labelled icon shows the number of used/unused Google Workspace licenses, license cost per user, potential savings, and license renewal dates.
Step 8: Under the “Group Management” labelled icon, one can manage different groups/departments across the organization.
Additionally, CloudFuze Manage lets you oversee both public and private team members in this dashboard.
Step 9: Businesses can manage their primary and secondary domains using the “Domains” labelled icon present in the “Application” dashboard. Further, you can see its mail-enabled and active status in this dashboard.
Step 10: IT managers can generate and download audit-ready reports for 7,30, or 180-day time window.
Step 11: The Finance team of an organization can set and receive license renewal alerts for their Google Workspace using our platform.
10. Gain Total Control Over Your Google Workspace with CloudFuze’s SaaS Management Platform
In an organization with a distributed work culture, like in-office, hybrid, and remote, managing Google Workspace manually can be time-consuming and tedious. Businesses can streamline their entire SaaS ecosystem, including Google Workspace, using our SaaS management solution.
From automating onboarding and offboarding user workflows across Google Workspace to eliminating Google Workspace license waste, our platform offers full visibility and control over your Google ecosystem. All of this is managed through a single, powerful dashboard that can help reduce Google Workspace subscription costs up to 30%.
We also offer flexible per-user pricing options to serve businesses of all sizes.
Get started with CloudFuze Manage today!
Contact us for a free demo and a detailed discussion!
11. Frequently Asked Questions
What is Google Workspace Optimization?
Google Workspace Optimization refers to improving how your organization uses Google Workspace by simplifying user access management, automating workflows, managing SaaS licenses efficiently, and integrating it seamlessly with other SaaS tools for better ROI.
Can CloudFuze help with migrating data to or from Google Workspace?
Yes. CloudFuze Migrate supports transferring data from Google Workspace to Google Workspace without even writing a single line of code.
How are potential savings calculated in CloudFuze Manage?
Potential savings in our SaaS management tool are calculated based on the unused SaaS license for about 60 days.
