Becoming more common. Be thankful it is GSuite and not MS Exchange.

I wouldn't say it's unusual.. to my knowledge at e.g. Warwick in the UK the maths and CS-specific mail and web servers have been replaced for the most part by services operated centrally. It sounds like the replacements you've been told to use are inadequate for their intended purpose, however. Warwick's central CMS supports rendering LaTeX natively or via Mathjax because it's pretty important for mathematics use! You might like to check if your university offers central IT services that could provide you with hosting/a virtual server to use.

It’s extremely easy to enable MathJax on any website - literally a single line of HTML code that loads a JavaScript library. I’d be amazed if this isn’t possible to do on a Google site. As for “should I be upset”, I think you have several unrelated complaints (central campus email, time to migrate website, non-edu web domain) and only the last one seems a legitimate reason for griping. If your email address was non-edu that would also be a problem, but it sounds like that’s not the case.

The answers for the two are different, in my experience: Mail server: yes, very common. Web server: a lot less.

@MikePierce I see. Well, a WYSIWYG site-building tool seems in general like a very limited sort of solution that doesn’t respect the needs of power users, even ignoring the MathJax issue. Sounds seriously lame if you ask my opinion. Your department is being penny wise and reputation foolish on this issue if that’s the only option they’re offering.

Your employer is also telling its math department that it can't use MathJobs for hiring, and that applicants and rec letter writers instead have to use a stupid homegrown website.

From my former-IT perspective: this is a normal part of the dance of IT and administrative bureaucracy. For a few years the CTO will outsource and claim great gains in cutting costs and focusing on "core competencies". He'll quit and get a better, higher paying job, and then his replacement will bring the services back in house to "focus on client needs and responsiveness". Then he'll quit and get a higher paying job, and his replacement will start outsourcing...this process continues until we all go extinct.

Wouldn’t outsourcing to Google potentially breach student data protection regulations since Google reads every email that gets sent over their service?

To clarify, all the faculty also need to migrate their webpages?

I would be surprised at web/email server hosting at the department level. IME, this is more commonly handled at the university level. I'd be aggravated at entirely outsourcing it to Google. Where I am we have faculty email by the college and student email by Google.

I agree with @nick012000 that it's hard to parse how outsourcing to Google doesn't violate privacy laws -- yet it's done at legions of schools, law firms, hospitals, etc. I just don't understand how that's justified.

@DanielR.Collins Gee, guess what? Google's contracts with these companies are compatible with the relevant legislation. Whodathunkit?

@BrianH That could/should be a Dilbert strip!

Buying a web hosting service would cost you a few euros each month

Are you sure you won't still have the same .edu mail account that you previously had? Google services allows you to brand your domain with whatever you want, more or less. If you just get a personal gmail account you will have an @gmail.com, but if your institute is using google services then they will probably be giving out @someinstitute.edu addresses, and likewise for any hosted web presence.

@usul I've updated the post. It sounds like the faculty have to move theirs too? But without a redirect from the old math.univ.edu/~name site to a new one.

@J... I've updated the post. Yeah, the university email though GMail still has a .edu at least. But the fate of my [email protected] that I've been using is less certain. But it sounds like they'll do something to make that address work though Google.

@DavidRicherby: Do you have court citations, or are you just asking me to take speculation by unknown internet commentator as fact?

For all the broken links, you really should have something set up to service 301 redirects on the content from the previous site. This should be entirely the responsibility of the IT department, I should think.

@DanielR.Collins The burden of proof is on the "unknown internet commenter" who is speculating that "legions of schools, law firms, hospitals, etc." are breaking the law, no?

@DavidRicherby: I'll take that to mean "No, I don't have any citations for that".

@DanielR.Collins And your citations are... where, exactly?

@DavidRicherby: I expressed uncertainty, quote, "I just don't understand". You expressed certainty, that they're definitely compatible. The fact that you can't parse the difference reduces your credibility further with every comment.

@DanielR.Collins If no privacy laws conflicting with the practice exist then what exactly is there to cite? Conversely, you framed your "uncertainty" as saying it was "hard to parse", yet you clearly aren't attempting to parse any specific legislation.

Speculation in both directions is fun, but the idea that either party to these agreements has wandered into a clear-cut legal liability for violating privacy law that can be uncovered by the gut instinct of a disinterested internet commenter is surely the more fanciful scenario