1 General Overview

This is a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between the UC Berkeley campus community and Berkeley IT to document:

• Google Workspace Service Description
• General levels of response, availability, and maintenance associated with this service
• Responsibilities of Berkeley IT as a provider of these services
• Responsibilities of the clients receiving these services

This Agreement is valid from January 24, 2023. Review will be completed every year, or as otherwise needed.

2 Service Description

2.1 Service Scope 

Google Workspace for Education is a cloud-based suite of productivity tools, which includes:

• email
• calendar
• chat
• contacts
• drive 
• gemini
• groups (bConnected Lists)
• meet
• sites
• tasks

Collectively, these are known as core services. These core services are available to the UC Berkeley community (current students, faculty, staff, and certain affiliates) at no-cost, with no advertisements. These services are covered under the University of California systemwide contract with Google. 

Please note: additional Google Consumer services are available for your use, but are not covered under our UC contract. Compliance with data classification standards may vary.  View full list of enabled Consumer services here.

 

2.2 Service Eligibility

The Berkeley Google Workspace service is available to the following campus affiliations:

Departmental Use

• Special Purpose Accounts (SPAs)
  
  • SPAs are not impacted by the account lifecycle process outlined in section 3.2

Personal Use

Personal accounts remain eligible through the end of their grace period.

• Students
• Faculty and other academic titles, including Emeriti
• Staff
• UCPath Affiliates
• Staff retirees who sign up for service via the Berkeley Retirement Center

Alumni

Alumni should refer to the Alumni Email SLA, this SLA does not apply to alumni.

Not Eligible

• Students who have not submitted their Statement of Intent to Register

 

Individual Account Storage Limits

• All new accounts created after July 5, 2023 are assigned a storage limit of 50 GB
• There are no exceptions for storage limits above 150 GB on individual accounts.
• To request an increase from 50 GB to 150 GB complete this form while logged into your Berkeley Google account.

SPA Accounts

• All existing SPA accounts holding more than 150 GB will be required to reduce their content in 2024.
• There are no exceptions for storage limits above 150 GB on SPA accounts.
• To request an increase from 25 GB to 150 GB complete this form while logged in as the SPA account.

Shared Drives

• Faculty and staff are eligible to create new shared drives
• All new shared drives created after July 5, 2023 are assigned a storage limit of 25 GB
• If you are using a shared drive for departmental/unit/group use, and the content is active and collaborative and shared between several people, you can request an Expanded Shared Drive.
• More options for Shared Drives can be found on the Content Collaboration Services website.

Google Photos

• Google Photos is being phased out at UC Berkeley. All new accounts have Google Photos disabled by default as of July 5, 2023
• Existing accounts with no Google Photos data will have Photos disabled on Jul 5, 2023
• If you would like to use Google Photos for business purposes, please complete this form.

 

2.3 Operating Parameters

The Google Workspace service is provided to people who work for or attend UC Berkeley, including faculty, staff, students, and others for UC Berkeley related business, education and research. Collaborators outside of UC Berkeley can use their own consumer or enterprise Google Workspace accounts to access content shared with them from UC Berkeley Google Workspace accounts.

2.4 Service Level Performance

For support requests submitted online via ServiceNow, response times will be tracked and reported as part of the Berkeley IT and Campus SLA. 

3 Roles and Responsibilities

3.1 Parties

The following Service Owner(s) will be used as the basis of the Agreement and represent the primary stakeholders associated with this SLA:

3.2 Berkeley IT Responsibilities 

Berkeley IT responsibilities and/or requirements in support of this Agreement include:

• Manage Google Workspace environment for UC Berkeley, including provisioning and deprovisioning of accounts 
• Implement and maintain the account and content lifecycle for non-SPAs:
  
  • For customers in their grace period, the Google Workspace account and data remain fully accessible. Once an account expires, the account and content stored in Google Workspace will begin the decommissioning cycle.
  • On the date of account expiration, the account will become inaccessible to the account holder, but the data owned by the account shared with other accounts will continue to be available for six months.
  • Six months after expiration, the data will no longer be available to collaborators.
  • One year after expiration, the account and all data owned by the account will be irrevocably deleted.
• Provide timely notice to customers who are collaborators on content owned by an expired account so that the content can be claimed prior to removal.
• Provide timely notice to customers if costs will be introduced for additional storage consumption beyond their storage limit.
• Manage Google Workspace add-on and integration requests 
• Meet response times associated with the priority assigned to incidents and service requests in the IT Request ticketing system (ServiceNow).
• Post scheduled changes on the Berkeley IT Change Management calendar, notify IT managers and campus business partners, and notify all faculty, staff, and students when needed. 
• Follow the principle of least perusal, policy for access without consent, and other specifications in the UC Electronic Communications Policy. 

3.3 Customer Responsibilities

Customer responsibilities and/or requirements in support of this Agreement include:

• Following acceptable use guidelines within the Google Workspace terms of service
• Customers should not use Google Workspace as a primary data backup repository or for the storage of data that is not intended for regular access and use, such as operating system files, application files, backup or archival storage. 
• Google Drive & Gmail are approved for use up to the P3 data protection level. Other Google core services like Sites, Calendars and Chat should be limited to P1/P2 data where possible to prevent inadvertently exposing sensitive information.  P4 data is not permitted anywhere in Google Workspace.
  
  
  

  Service	Data Protection Level	Supported by bIT
  bMail/GMail/email	P3	yes
  Google Drive/shared drives	P3	yes
  Google Classroom	P3	no
  Meet	P3	yes
  Google Groups/lists	P3	yes
  Google Jamboard	P3	no
  Google Keep	P3	no
  Google Sites	P3	no
  Google Photos	P1	no
  Google Tasks	P3	no
  Google Colab	P1	no
  Google Ads	P1	no
  Google Analytics	P1	Yes if used with Open Berkeley, otherwise no
  Google Cloud Platform	P3	yes
  Google Maps	P1	no
  Google My Business	P1	no
  Google Looker Studio	P1	no
  YouTube	P1	no

• Adherence to the following policies:
  
  • UC Electronic Communications Policy 
  • Campus Online Activities Policy
  • Computer Use Policy for UC Berkeley
  • Data Use Agreement for Google Workspace and Google Apps for Education
• Maintaining storage consumption within the allocated storage limit
• Departments are responsible for reclaiming content owned by offboarding customers upon notification
• Responsible storage and ownership of data
  
  • Departmental, administrative, and research content should be owned by a SPA and stored in a Google shared drive
  • Personal content should remain in personal accounts
• Contact the IT Service Manager for additions or changes in established service levels
• Students should contact the Student Help Desk for incidents
• Faculty and staff should contact the ITCS Service Desk for incidents
•  

Accounts above standard storage limit

Accounts that are above the standard storage limit as outlined in section 2.2 are subject to the following additional responsibilities:

• The customer agrees to pay for storage consumption over the standard storage limit if a pay option for additional storage is introduced (no earlier than fiscal year 2024, see section 7 of this document, “Pricing”).
• Customer is responsible for all data egress charges
  
  • If a cost is incurred to move the customer’s content off of or onto the Google Workspace platform, including to or from another service, the customer is responsible for the cost to move the content.

4 Requesting Service

• Online/IT Request
• Phone: 510-664-9000

5 Hours of Coverage, Response Times and Escalation

For all requests, the Berkeley IT goal is to have a staff member assigned and acknowledge requests within four business hours of receipt. Campus priorities may require exceptions to this goal during certain periods of the academic year, including curtailment and holidays. 

5.1 Hours of Coverage

Google Workspace Service staff coverage is provided 8AM - 5PM PT, Monday - Friday except for holidays including curtailment days, and campus closure. 

5.2 Service Outages and Major Incidents

The Google Workspace service is monitored by the Google Workspace service team. Any outage that impacts the ability for the campus community to complete work will follow standard notification procedures starting with the service desks and One IT, and will be posted at the System Status Dashboard. Any support tickets related to outages will be addressed during the next hours of coverage, noted in section 5.1 of this document. Outages classified as a major incident will follow major incident protocols. Information about Google Workspace service disruptions is available at the Google Workspace Status Dashboard.

6 Maintenance and Service Changes

The Google Workspace Service abides by the standard maintenance and service change process whenever possible. Changes are listed on the Berkeley System Status page: System Status Dashboard

7 Pricing

Berkeley Google Workspace accounts are currently funded through the Productivity Suite, and have no direct charge to customers. 

If a pay option is introduced, no earlier than fiscal year 2024, the customer will be responsible for payment to maintain a storage limit above the standard level. If a storage limit increase is requested and granted prior to the pay option implementation, this indicates the customer’s agreement to pay for the increased storage level if/when a pay for more storage option is introduced.

8 Reviewing and Reporting

You can also review published First Response Service Level Agreements (SLAs)