Outsourced Google Workspace administration

Between twenty and three hundred seats there is a persistent awkwardness. Workspace administration is perhaps a day a week of genuine work, which is too much for an office manager doing it between other duties and too little to justify hiring for. The result is usually that it gets done reactively, by whoever is least busy, with no documentation.

Outsourcing that specific function gives you a named engineer who knows the tenant, works from a runbook, logs every change, and is backed by a deputy who can cover absence. The improvement over the status quo is generally not capability, it is consistency.

Before we touch anything, we agree in writing who may request what. Access to finance shared drives requires the finance lead. Creating a super admin requires two named approvers. Anything affecting security policy requires a specific person and a written request rather than a phone call.

This matters because the realistic attack on an outsourced administrator is not technical. It is a convincing message from a name the engineer recognises, at a moment when the request seems reasonable. A matrix converts that into an escalation, which is exactly what you want to happen.

Super-admin ownership of the tenant stays with you, always. We work under delegated roles with the narrowest privilege set that lets the job be done, and there is at least one super-admin account under your sole control that we do not hold credentials for.

Billing ownership also stays with you unless you specifically want us to hold it. Keeping the commercial relationship with Google separate from the operational relationship with us means changing supplier does not require changing platform.

Thirty days' notice, and the handover pack is prepared in advance rather than assembled during the notice period. It contains the current runbook, the change log history, the authorisation matrix, the current configuration baseline and a list of open recommendations.

An outsourcing arrangement that would be painful to exit is a liability regardless of how well it is running today. We would rather be kept because the service is good than because leaving is hard.