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

My prediction.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There will be a subset of users who will hate it, mostly serious Excel jockies and the extremely change averse, but on the whole it'll be pretty popular.

The biggest thing is space. In my(admittedly modest; but definitely nonzero) experience, users really, really hate dealing with storage quotas and love doing things(like storing files in the form of email attachments) that bump them into quotas. Unless the LA IT guys were unusually generous, or their deal with Google unusually stingy, most user's quotas will probably go up substantially. Plus, with Google doc's sharing functions, there will hopefully be much less attachment clutter eating email quota space.

Aside from heavy users of particular Office functions, who will almost certainly end up retaining local copies of office one way or another(whether it be official IT department policy, or local departmental budgets, or some other means), most people will probably care more about not bumping into quotas than anything else.

Passing the Buck

[_bug_]

Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?

No.

What it has done is given IT administrators the opportunity to pass the buck when there's a problem with a system. Now when the e-mail system goes down for hours and employees can't access crucial data, the IT admin simply points at Google and says "it's not my fault or my problem".

That's all cloud computing offers. Unless you're a bit paranoid, in which case it also provides a single-point of attack for the government to eavesdrop under the banner of "keeping America safe".

Re:Passing the Buck

[Miros]

You're missing something more important here; it allows companies to shift costs from capital equipment to operating expenses which is HUGE from a business standpoint. Not to mention that it ultimately reduces the number of people needed to maintain these systems which is also very significant for large organizations. Reducing the costs involved is far more important than shifting the blame ever is; the people who make these kinds of decisions likely don't give a crap whose job it is to keep it up and running so long as it meets their needs and has a net positive impact on the bottom line.

Re:Why segregate?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't be surprised if it had something to do with the Federal Information Security Management Act, from TFA:

Google has pushed Google Apps as an option for government agencies, promising to ship a product called Government Cloud, which will be certified under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), sometime next year.

I would guess that some provision in it requires segregated data servers, just in case the public consumer computer gets 'owned' by a cracker, that the government network is not instantly vulnerable.

That's just guessing, it could be for any other number of reasons. IANAL, I am not a network engineer or security expert, and I only scanned the article to get some free, pointless, anonymous informative karma :)

Re:Monopoly position to overcharge for their softw

[mc moss]

No, actually it's nothing like that. Reading a book doesn't require anything proprietary and it doesn't have to work with other software, etc.

But I'm sure you have more knowledge about the case than the judge who made the decision.

Re:Monopoly position to overcharge for their softw

[IP_Troll]

The is the whole point of a "monopoly position", they didn't just make a product, they eliminated all other reasonable alternatives to their product, creating an artificially high price.

Your JK Rowling analogy is missing the part where JK Rowling buys up every other publishing company, shuts them down, turns the book industry into a harry Potter monoculture, and makes Harry Potter the only book series on the planet aside from a few hold outs that have the creativity to write their own books.

Re:The times are changing

[slim]

I think this is a step towards relieving MS of their monopoly, even on OSs.

How long until LA city employees don't need Windows for anything. If everything they do is in the browser, they can use Linux (maybe in the guise of ChromeOS)

Re:Why segregate?

[oenone.ablaze]

Also, it sounds like multiple governments', or at least multiple government agencies' data are on the same cloud? I hope for Google's sake it doesn't get cracked, because pissing off one government sounds like no fun, let alone a handful of them.

Re:Why segregate?

[Schadrach]

It's probably a mix of FIMSA and public accountability/recordkeeping laws. Consider that one of the points made when Palin's Yahoo! email was "cracked" was that it was illegal for her to use that account for any kind of government business due to an accountability law in that state. Likely similar considerations are at the root of having a separate government cloud.