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LA's Move To Google Apps Slows As "Apps For Gov't." Announced
Several readers noted Google's announcement yesterday of Google Apps for Government: "The new version is a variant of Google Apps Premier edition, and includes the same core apps: Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sites, Groups, Video, and Postini. Pricing is the same as for Google Apps Premier: $50 per user per year. The certification says that Google Apps qualifies for is called a FISMA-Moderate rating, which means that it's authorized for use with data that's sensitive but unclassified. In addition, Google says that it's storing government Gmail and Google Calendar on servers that are isolated from those used for non-government customers, and which are located in the continental US." This service might be just what the city of Los Angeles needs (though the price may not be right). LA started migrating months ago to Google Apps, and the process is experiencing some delays, as pointed out by reader theodp. "In December, Google tooted its own horn as it celebrated edging out rival Microsoft to win a high-profile, ironically Microsoft-funded contract to supply email and collaboration software to the City of Los Angeles. Now comes word that the search giant has missed a June deadline for full implementation due to lingering security concerns. Google downplayed reports of the delay, saying it was 'very pleased with the progress to date' which has allowed 10,000+ of the City's 34,000 employees to use Google Apps."
Maybe it is because I'm an old hand (and I'm speaking for myself here), but there is something about having physical control of data in house, in a data center. This way, unless there is a network intrusion, one knows where critical information resides.
With a cloud provider, all I have is a promise of security.
This isn't to say that Google isn't secure, but I personally trust good locks on the doors and all people who have access to the data having signed contracts more than just a piece of paper with a promise that things are secure.
I work in a relatively small government organization - about 1200 people, only about 350 of which are office workers - and I can't imagine us even remotely considering this. Anything that involves storing ANY of our data on a server that doesn't reside in one of our 3 data centers is automatically nixed by IT. Heck, if you've got a decent IT staff, setting up basic stuff like webmail and the like isn't even that difficult or expensive. Apache, Horde, Postfix, and Dovecot will get you mostly there for nothing more than the cost of a decent server ($2k tops) and the time of a staff member to set it up (and that time, for full-time employees, is typically already paid for, so you might as well use it).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
At least I can avoid Google as a private citizen when I find its privacy practices abhorrent.
I feel sorry for the family I have in LA who won't have a choice but to have some of their government-handled private data on Google's servers.
Good thing she had NerdBlock+ and NoNerd running. No mom for ju!
Remember to maintain your supply of
Let’s see how this goes this brings a very big privacy and security factor into play. I can see small burrows and local entities using these services. The large government entities that need to be secure and have a lot of sensitive data not so much.
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
...and Google knows it. The government is flourishing, huzzah!
The Army reading list
Ok, so they will separate your data from everyone else's, but how do you know they aren't mining your data and storing the index on another machines? Remember, Google is an advertising company first. All of the other products like Postini, gDocs, etc are there just to give them more data to mine.
Your contract may state that they are not allowed to mine or even store your filtered data, but how would you ever know? Good luck executing an eDiscovery search on largest collector of data in the world. I'm sure the attorney's would love it though.
Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.
I don't know how other people feel, but I have been trying google apps and have been unimpressed. Writely is OK, but is only wysiwyg by severely limiting what you can do in a doc. It is fine for most collab docs though and sharing is great. My problems have been in using gdocs, its PDF to text conversion is a joke and is obvious just some untested open sources ocr toys. Their shareable links have been broken for weeks and is only acknowledged in their forums and somehow that isn't reported as a problem in their 'status' page. So none of my shared links work in my sites currently. Sites is an OK sharepoint-like web, but it does suffer from simplicity and general site feel much like 2007 sharepoint. You can't remove older revisions which happened to become a security issue for my group so we had to recreate some stuff. Overall it is a great free tool when you don't have anything else, but I don't think I would ever pay per seat for this. Also I think there is more to business than just collaboration tools. I figure if and whenever Microsoft gets .net fully setup in the cloud, all apps will be able to store and run in the cloud, etc.same as on disk. That is when companies can really start using the 'cloud'.
If they CAC enable it, they'll win.
Can you imagine if the federal government picked up Google tools as it's primary software? Those targeted ads would be amazing. It would make the U.S. the number one customer of some other, less popular countries industries:
"Need to spy on your citizens better, faster, and longer? Buy this new tracking software from Chang industries in China!"
"Citizens misbehaving? Pacify them with some good ol' Soviet era violence with the Stalin sub 1000!"
"Local press causing too much of a raucous? Take a lesson from down under and get Australia's new censor software 2.0!"
I'm sure you can all come up with some more creative ones.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
This is what you get, and what - currently - only very few federal agencies can afford:
An independent third party auditor issued Google Apps an unqualified SAS70 Type II certification. Google is proud to provide Google Apps administrators the peace of mind knowing that their data is secure under the SAS70 auditing industry standard.
The independent third party auditor verified that Google Apps has the following controls and protocols in place:
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/government/trust.html
Sure, it comes with a risk (do you have multiple redundant and trunked high speed internet connections?) but also with enorous freeing of public funds.
In my view, a win.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security - Ben Franklin
LA = Louisana
L.A. = Los Angeles
Tell me what decent IT staff would want to do the boring job of maintaining small email, web and IM servers for a few hundred people? It will get put to the end of the queue and forgotten about. I've yet to find a single person who can install a half decent mail server from scratch and and be bothered to do the work of maintaining it for year after year. This is one case where economies of scale are everything and Taylorism has a place. Efficient IT infrastructure needs to be big so that there's enough challenges for the MScs to keep them interested, and enough grunt work for the support army to cover for the inevitable churn of the boring low level jobs.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I don't work for LA City. I do work for LA County. I also work *with* LA City. I know the city is in somewhat dire straits financially and can't imagine how they'd be buying into anything.
I am constantly fighting the "cloud" and "shared services" initiatives. They propose to save money, but you have to spend millions and reduce your service levels in order to do so.
Nothing against Google in general, I just can't imagine something like this going well in an organization the size of LA City.
(By the way, I have documented that my in-house development and deployment of servers has saved LA County between $2M and $4M per year in potential vendor and infrastructure costs.)
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Marijuana practically legalized in California and its government moving away from Microsoft products. The economy really must be getting bad there!
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Nobody seems to have mentioned this yet, but it looks like at least part of the reason for the delay are "unforeseen requirements" that weren't in the initial arrangement with the city that Google's had to deal with. For example:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/26/google-city-of-los-angeles-apps-delay-is-overblown/
As for the delay, Google says that they are working with with the City of LA to "address requirements that were not included in the original contract." One example of these possible requirements that came up is that the LAPD wants to conduct background checks on all Google employees that have access to Google Apps data in the cloud. Doing these checks of course add more time to the adminstrative clock.
LAPD background checks on Google employees may very well be a reasonable request, but things like this add time to the schedule and weren't part of the original contract.
Now, tell me HOW reducing the number of employees who spend thousands of man hours correcting issues caused by Microsoft products is not a cost benefit for the taxpayers? Tell me HOW not having to maintain the in-house servers (humans, power,etc) is NOT a cost benefit for the taxpayers? And not to minimize your achievements, HOW does potential savings (your 2 to 4 million dollars) get validated in the real world? How does the taxpayer see the results of the fruits of your labors? Tell me HOW it costs more money and reduces services to go to the cloud concept, which is really a throwback to the old mainframe/timesharing system just using the web to handle the traffic and the PC/Mac acting as a "dumb" terminal? As a taxpayer in the County of Los Angeles, I'd like to know. To me, this is just more FUD thrown up to protect jobs, that if Microsoft's stuff actually WORKED, would be unneeded. Yes, I'm a cranky old mainframe guy who has seen WAY too many good ideas get killed for corporate profits or to preserve the status quo. Justify your claims of service reductions and increased costs please
That's what happens when you have senior sales guys meeting with managers.
Sales Guy, "Yeah, it will DO ALL OF THAT, and SAVE YOU OODLES OF MONEY."
Manager, "But does it work with my Blackberry? The IT guys tell me that Blackberry is important even though my kids have an iPhone and I like the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit app."
Sales guy, "Yes, it does work with your Blackberry."
Manager, "Alright, I'm SOLD."
They obviously failed to properly scope the work. They failed to consider LAPD's needs.
The city wasn't running Microsoft on the back end. They were using Novell and Groupwise for email (along with just about every other government agency / municipality in California). They decided to replace Groupwise with GAPE... or I guess in this case, GAGE (Google Apps Government Edition).... soon to be known as GAG? (Only time will tell on that one).
Well, it is simple.
(Trust me I'm not MS fan-boi.)
For the time period 2007-2009, my department spent an estimated $1,100,928 developing and enhancing two primary systems. This included all development and hardware costs. These systems take in between $300M and $400M per year in taxes and fees and are the largest of the kind by number of transactions processed in the US.
Vendor systems in this range have been quoted to us as costing between $4M and $6M outright with $500K to $800K/year in maintenance.
(Our accounting system - which is crap IMO - runs on a shared server and cost $160M.)
Here's how I came up with the figures.
Development Costs for JEDI System November 2007 - January 2009
Software
MSDN $50,000.00
Team Foundation Server $10,000.00
Janis Controls $20,000.00
Atlasoft Controls $20,000.00
Analysts
Specifications $138,622
Documentation $110,856
Training $52,100
Testing $146,178
Programmers
Development: $523,172
Management
Oversight: $30,000.00
Total: $1,100,928.00
Now, you can add in the overhead costs for servers and the personnel to cover the servers. We currently have 89 servers on racks in our server room. These servers must be up 18/6 and are absolutely essential during certain time periods. We have four staff members running the servers and an additional six staff members maintaining our 800+ workstations, LAN and six remote locations.
I’m a taxpayer also, and cannot stand to see money wasted. If I were to move to the cloud – the ultimate in vaporware IMO – we’d be moving to a service level that is set by the vendor and not in our control. We already have some services moved to the cloud. IIRC, the department spent around $1M on a vendor-hosted system that has been less than reliable and very expensive to maintain.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Ah.. thank you for the numbers.. I can see how you arrived at the projection ..now we have to see if the reality matches the calculations :-)
thanks for taking the time to do the breakdown for me/us
Give me just one example of sensitive data that gas escaped from a major cloud service (Google, Amazon, etc), and I'll give you 10 more examples of data that has escaped from an incompetent IT organization's in house systems. Do *your* in house systems allow you to configure ALL your user's desktops and laptops to be completely disposable, with no other software necessary than a recent version of Firefox or Chrome? Never had a DBA accidentally botch a transaction, do your users never accidentally delete email, never had a spearphishing attempt slip though your spamassassin filters? Never put off a software upgrade because your users were to busy for downtime? Never had a backup fail?
Let's just admit it's all the politics of control, which is fine. Personally, I'd rather not do the shit work of reading log files, restoring lost email and files, forgotten passwords, and cleaning up the mess when a user gets phished.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
No problem. I hate overspending as much as the next guy... ...well maybe not as much as the City Manager in the City of Bell (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/20/bell-city-manager-scandal_n_653304.html) but as most people.
If I thought the Cloud - or the mainframe - was a better value, I'd be all over it. In fact, I get hit by vendors (HP, EMC, IBM) all the time asking to put their hugely expensive "server farm" in with dozens of VM's. I prefer the Amazon or Google approach, with multiple low-cost servers that can be replaced quickly and inexpensively.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Don't forget you need (at least) another server housed in another datacenter for redundancy, and a complex system to keep the redundant system data live and provide automatic failover. And you're merely hiding setup or maintenance labour costs by saying existing employees will handle all this - in fact you have to apportion a fair fraction of their total cost. Then there's the cost of the server rooms, climate control, UPS, electricity, etc.
If you bother to do the sums, you'll be appalled by the cost of providing webmail for your organisation. Now add in the cost of providing and supporting Word, Excel and Powerpoint. And the cost your websites and wikis. And even your custom web apps, and the other apps that could/should be rebuilt as web apps. Google will provide ALL this for $50/person - that's $60K p.a. for your entire organisation, assuming no discount for over 1000 people. Scared yet?
Now lets look at the risk side of the equation. There are huge amounts of FUD around this issue, but does anyone have any reliable evidence of significant privacy or data loss from Google? I can't recall hearing about a single case, despite posing this question on Slashdot before. But I have heard innumerable cases of the same thing happening from in-house systems.
Your problem is that one day someone will explain all this to your bean-counters. The opportunity to make this level of savings comes once in a lifetime for these guys, and if you are lucky they may hesitate long enough to confirm the risk-return equation before your world comes crashing down around your ears.
My advice would be to start learning about Appengine, or EC2 or Azure, and figure out how you could migrate your existing systems. Then you have a choice - if you prefer your boss and co-workers over career advancement, keep quiet until the day comes. Otherwise sit down next to a bean-counter at lunch, and start talking about clouds. You'll be head of IT within six months.
Do as you would be done to.
This LAPD memo explains why LAPD is not on board.
For more details, try council file 09-1714.
One example of these possible requirements that came up is that the LAPD wants to conduct background checks on all Google employees that have access to Google Apps data in the cloud
That's pretty interesting but I'm not sure why it would be a part of schedule slip, given that almost all the work is on the LAPD to run the checks. Google just has to come up with the right list of people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wohoo, when will we see google.gov?
If I use google apps service and someone sues me, can I get google to certify that I have not deleted or destroyed any document? Would I be able to argue "in this case absence of evidence is evidence of absence because we have this certificate from google saying we did not destroy anything".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact