Manage data policies for specific shared drives

Supported editions for this feature: Business Standard and Business Plus; Enterprise; Education Fundamentals, Education Standard, Teaching and Learning Upgrade, and Education Plus; Nonprofits; G Suite Business; Essentials.  Compare your edition

As an administrator, you control your organization’s policies on files in Google Drive, including files in shared drives. By default, shared drives are assigned to the top organizational unit, and the policies you set on that organizational unit apply to all shared drives. However, you can also assign shared drives to child organizational units so that the policies applied to those organizational units apply to the shared drives assigned to them. You can also set the default organizational unit that shared drives are created in.

Why assign shared drives to organizational units?

Assigning shared drives to organizational units gives you more granular control on data sharing, security, and storage. For example:

• If your Drive sharing settings for your top organizational unit don’t allow sharing with external users or moving content to external Drive locations, but do allow them for child organizational units that collaborate with external people, you can assign shared drives to those child organizational units. That way, those teams can use shared drives effectively while your overall policy can stay more restrictive.
• If you want the data protection rules set for an organizational unit to apply to certain shared drives, you can assign the shared drives to that organizational unit so that the same data protection rules apply. 
• If you set data region policies for organizational units and want those policies to apply to data in shared drives used by those organizational units, you can assign the shared drives to that organizational unit. That way, the data in those shared drives follows your data region policies.
• If you want to set different storage limits on shared drives by organizational unit, you can assign shared drives to organizational units and then set storage limits for each one.

Assign a shared drive to an organizational unit

1. Sign in to your Google Admin console.

   Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).

2. In the Admin console, go to Menu  AppsGoogle WorkspaceDrive and Docs.
3. Click Manage shared drives.
4. Find one or more shared drives you want to move.
   • To sort by the amount of storage used, click the Storage Used column header.
   • To filter the list, click Add a filter. You can filter by Shared drive name, Status, Date created, No members, and No managers.
   • To find shared drives in specific organizational units, at the left click Selected organizational units. Specify which organizational units' shared drives you want to see.
5. To move a single shared drive, point to the row, click MoreChange organizational unit. To move several shared drives at once, check the box next to each shared drive, then at the top click Change organizational unit.
6. Select the organizational unit you want to move the shared drives to, then click Continue.
7. Click Move.

Set the default organizational unit for new shared drives

1. Sign in to your Google Admin console.

   Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).

2. In the Admin console, go to Menu  AppsGoogle WorkspaceDrive and Docs.
3. Click Sharing settings.
4. To apply the setting to everyone, leave the top organizational unit selected. Otherwise, select a child organizational unit.
5. Click Shared drive creation.
6. Under Organizational unit for new shared drives, select which organizational unit to assign new shared drives to.
7. Click Save. If you configured a child organizational unit, you might be able to Inherit or Override a parent organizational unit's settings.