US Army offers Google Workspace to personnel due to shortfall in Army 365 licensing

The US Army has provided Google Workspace collaboration suite, to more than 180,000 personnel due to email licensing shortfalls and other IT challenges. The Google platform was considered to serve troops who lost access to official email accounts. When the US service transitioned to Army 365, it moved to an individual-license model, but identified there would not be enough Microsoft licenses to cover the personnel.

Google and Microsoft compete in multiple areas and were in late 2022 picked by the Pentagon, alongside Amazon and Oracle, for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract. Google announced the Workspace package achieved IL4 authorization, a security requirement related to the handling of critical infrastructure, defense, intelligence, finance and proprietary business information. It had previously achieved FedRAMP High authorization.