How to manage Google Drive at scale: 7 best practices for Google Workspace admins
- Author: CloudM
Google Drive is easy to start using. That’s part of the appeal.
People create files, teams set up Shared Drives, agencies and contractors are added, links get shared. Most of it happens because someone needs to get work done quickly. The admin problem tends to appear later.
You end up with Shared Drives nobody really owns, users with access they probably no longer need, public links that are still active, and important files sitting in My Drive rather than somewhere easier to govern.
Google Workspace already gives admins a solid set of controls for Shared Drives, members, access levels and sharing restrictions. For a smaller environment, those controls may be all you need.
The harder part is when the job shifts from managing one Drive to managing hundreds of Drives. That’s where visibility becomes just as important as control.
Here are seven practical ways to keep Google Drive manageable as your organization’s environment gets more complex.
1. Build a clear view of your Shared Drives
Before changing anything, it helps to know what you actually have. At a minimum, you probably want to know:
- which Shared Drives exist and who manages them
- how many members each Shared Drive has and which Organisational Unit they belong to
- Are there external members
- Are public links in use
- how much data they hold
- Which Drives don’t have a manager
Google Workspace admins can manage Shared Drives and members in the Admin console, including adding or removing members and changing access levels. Google also lets admins step in when a Shared Drive has no members or no managers.
For a handful of Drives that may be fine but once you hit hundreds, opening each one individually stops becomes impossible to manage.
Drive Management for Automate & Protect, brings Shared Drives into one inventory. Admins can search and filter by Drive name, organisational unit, sync status, members, managers and permissions, and choose which columns they want to see. It also flags unmanaged Shared Drives directly.
The useful bit is not just that the data is in one place. It’s that you can quickly work out where to look first.
2. Find unmanaged Shared Drives
Unmanaged Shared Drives are easy to create accidentally: A manager leaves. A project ends. Responsibility shifts elsewhere. And the Drive stays behind.
An unmanaged Shared Drive can lead to external users retaining access, sharing settings with outdated policies, duplicate or obsolete Drives accumulating over time and no accountability for what happens to the content.
Google Workspace already gives admins a way to step in and manage Shared Drives that have no manager or members. So the issue is less “can this be fixed?” and more “how quickly can you find every Drive that needs fixing?”
Drive Management flags Shared Drives without a manager and lets admins filter down to those Drives so you can decide whether to:
- assign a new manager
- review members and external access
- clean up old content
- move the Drive if it belongs elsewhere
- delete it if it is genuinely no longer needed
The goal isn’t to eliminate every old Shared Drive. It’s to make sure the ones you keep still have clear ownership and appropriate access.
3. Keep external sharing visible
External collaboration is a normal part of Google Workspace. The problem is external access that nobody remembers is still there. That matters because access which made sense six months ago may not make sense now.
A useful review should look at things like:
- Which Shared Drives have external members?
- Which files are publicly accessible?
- Which external users still have access?
- Are those permissions still required?
In Automate & Protect, Shared Drive information, like managers, members, public-link counts, organisational unit and permissions, are all in the same place so admins can filter and investigate those areas quickly.
Google Workspace gives you the controls. A management layer, like found in Automate & Protect, can make it easier to see where those controls need attention.
4. Review permissions, not just membership
Membership is only one part of the picture. In Shared Drives different roles have different levels of access. Managers can control membership and settings, while other roles may be able to contribute, edit, comment or simply view content. Google also allows specific sharing restrictions to be applied at Shared Drive level.
Regular reviews should look at:
- what level of access members have
- whether external users still need that access
- whether files or folders have been shared more widely than intended
- whether the Drive’s settings still match current policy
This is particularly important for Drives containing sensitive business, finance, HR or customer information.
5. Don’t ignore users’ My Drives
Shared Drives tend to get most of the governance attention because they are designed for organisational ownership.
But important business content can still end up inside individual users’ My Drives which creates a visibility problem for IT teams, especially when somebody leaves. You suddenly need to work out:
- what files they own
- what has been shared externally
- which content other people rely on
- what needs transferring
- what can safely be deleted
Automate & Protect adds a My Drive view to the user record. An admin can open a user’s Drive content without signing in as that user, search across files, filter by things like link access and file type, and review ownership and sharing.
Admins can also manage access, rename, move or delete files and folders. Individual My Drive files can be transferred to another user, although Google does not support transferring ownership of a whole folder and its contents in one go.
6. Make Drive cleanup part of offboarding
Offboarding is where a lot of Drive problems surface all at once. A departing employee may own files, manage Shared Drives, have access to sensitive content or have shared files with people outside the business.
The cleaner approach is to make Drive review part of a repeatable offboarding process. Drive Management can help admins review ownership, sharing and Drive content. Workflows within Automate & Protect can automate repeatable offboarding steps. Backup or Archive can then protect or retain data where needed.
7. Stop repeating the same Drive changes one by one
There is a big difference between fixing one Shared Drive and fixing fifty. Google’s native controls work well when you know exactly which Drive you need to change but doesn’t scale across larger organizations.
Drive Management supports actions across multiple Shared Drives, including updating Drive settings, adding members, changing organisational units and deleting Drives.
At scale, the principle is simple:
That might mean:
- applying consistent membership changes
- updating sharing controls
- reviewing groups of unmanaged Drives
- changing organisational placement
- cleaning up obsolete Drives
The benefit is partly speed. But it is also about reducing inconsistency. If twenty Drives need the same fix, doing that work twenty separate times creates twenty chances to miss something.
When Google Workspace’s native controls aren’t enough
Not every organisation needs another management layer. But when you have hundreds of Drives that need attention, a tool like Drive Management for Automate & Protect is a game changer.
Drive Management gives admins a central view across Shared Drives and users’ My Drives, including managers, members, ownership, public links and other sharing information. From there, admins can investigate individual Drives and files, manage permissions and, depending on their Drive Management tier, take action across Shared Drives at a wider scale.
It also sits alongside Backup, Archive, Workflows and Email Signatures, so Drive governance can form part of a broader Google Workspace management and offboarding approach rather than living in its own silo.
