Los Angeles Goes Google Apps With Microsoft Cash

Dan Jones writes "The Los Angeles City Council has approved a US$7.25 million, five-year deal with Google in which the city will adopt Gmail and other Google Apps. Interestingly, just over $1.5 million for the project will come from the payout of a 2006 class action lawsuit between the City and Microsoft (Microsoft paid $70 million three years ago to settle the suit by six California counties and cities who alleged that Microsoft used its monopoly position to overcharge for software). The city will migrate from Novell GroupWise e-mail servers. For security, Google will provide a new separate data environment called 'GovCloud' to store both applications and data in a completely segregated environment that will only be used by public agencies. This GovCloud would be encrypted and 'physically and logically segregated' from Google's standard applications. Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?"

Comments

Cloud?

[truthsearch]

Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?

No. Someone's just getting a dedicated data center hosting scalable web apps. Nothing new.

Of all the places on the interwebs, I would hope /. could refrain from the marketing babble.

Re:Gmail is not ready.

[godztempus]

"This GovCloud would be encrypted and 'physically and logically segregated' from Google's standard applications." I'm sure the gmail outages are the reason for this part. Physically and logically segregated means that if gmail goes down, GovCloud won't. If your exchange team had to manage the email for millions of users they would be having more outages then gmail.

Re:Why segregate?

[stocke2]

Having your own email servers, if you loose internet you still can't send/receive email, so no big deal

You can always pop/imap your email from google and can use offline access with google email/calendar/docs.

We changed over to google apps here at work and the offline access has been good for us here.