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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?"
I thought "Microsoft Cash" was a new marvellous Redmond product I hadn't heard of.
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.
Developers: We can use your help.
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.
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".
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 :)
You neglect the effect of the close call that MS experienced that tempered, somewhat its proclivity for using the Mafia business model. Remember even under the W, supposedly MS was under judicial restraint. Those factors had to play a role in allowing competition to reappear*.
* However, if you look at the netbook experience where Linux suddenly vanished (supposedly completely) from its initial dominance one can see hints that MS is probably back to its old game, but the environment has altered in the interim.
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.
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.
"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.
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)
Blasphemy! Obviously he's better than Google, and handles millions of users from his mom's basement using a server running on a classic Gameboy!
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.
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.
A Smith & Wesson beats four aces -- Murphy's Law of Poker
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.