Reliability

Google Workspace offers a 99.9% Service Level Agreement (SLA) for covered services, and in recent years we’ve exceeded this promise. In 2020, Gmail achieved 99.9% availability. Furthermore, Google Workspace has no scheduled downtime or maintenance windows. Unlike most providers, we do not plan for our applications to be unavailable, even when we're upgrading our services or maintaining our systems. Google Cloud Platform SLAs for each product can be found within our Terms of Service.

To minimize service interruption due to hardware failures, natural disasters, or other incidents, Google has built a highly redundant infrastructure of data centers. Google Workspace has an RPO (Recovery Point Objective) target of zero, and our RTO (Recovery Time Objective) target is instant failover (or zero).

Google’s application and network architecture is designed for maximum reliability and uptime. Data is distributed across Google's servers and data centers. If a machine—or even an entire data center—fails, your data will still be accessible. Google owns and operates data centers around the world to keep the services you use running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Google's application and network architecture is designed for maximum reliability and uptime. Google's computing platform assumes ongoing hardware failure, and it uses robust software failover to withstand disruption. All Google systems are inherently redundant by design, and each subsystem is not dependent on any particular physical or logical server for ongoing operation. Data is replicated multiple times across Google's clustered active servers so that, in the case of a machine failure, data will still be accessible through another system. We also replicate data to secondary data centers to ensure protection from data center failures.

Google has a business continuity plan for its data centers and production operations. This plan accounts for major disasters such as earthquakes and public health crises, and it assumes people and services may be unavailable for up to 30 days. This plan is designed to support continued delivery of our services to our customers.

Google’s services are designed for millions of users. We run multiple different performance tests, including load testing our applications under high load over a long period, to observe effects on factors, such as memory use and response time. Google also performs stress testing to examine system performance in unusual situations, including system functional testing while under unusually heavy loads, heavy repetition of certain actions or inputs, or input of large numerical values and large, complex queries to a database system.

Once a client administrator or user has deleted data in Google Workspace, our Google systems delete it according to our Privacy Policy or your Google Workspace agreement (including the Data Processing Amendment for customers who execute it). The pointers to a user’s data are deleted immediately once a client's administrator deletes a user account. Learn more about best practices for deleting users.

If you need to recover email messages or data stored in Google Drive, Google offers specific archiving products that complement Google Workspace and Google Workspace for Education.

For other data recovery solutions, be sure to consult the Google Workspace Marketplace, where one of our partners may have a solution that meets your needs.

We provide tools to make it easy tools to make it easy for you to take your data with you without penalty or extra cost imposed by Google. Administrators can export customer data in standard formats at any time during the term of the agreement. Google doesn't charge a fee for exporting data from Google Workspace. Google Cloud Platform customers can extract their data using industry standard tools, for which there may be charges.