Bladewatch.com

PublicTechnology.net

The City Council in Los Angeles has approved a $7.2m deal to use Google Apps, but security concerns are still evident with a contingency clause requiring integration provider CSC to pay penalties in the event of any breaches.

The City Administrative Officer (CAO) expects that the move will cost LA an estimated $17.6 million over five years whereas remaining with the existing on premises system would cost $23 million. “The city of Los Angeles has made a world-class decision today to support a state-of-the-art e-mail system,” said Councilman Tony Cardenas who was behind the original motion to make the shift to Google.

Despite lobbying by Microsoft, the LA City Council ended months of speculation and debate with a decision to transfer e-mail operations for its 30,000 employees to Google. The deal is significant for public sector Cloud Computing. The Obama administration in the US is a keen advocate of the Cloud model, but has met with some resistance from federal CIOs. LA becomes the largest city in the US to make the move to Google and will be watched closely as an example of good practice.

I have been speaking with colleagues about the whole Google Apps scenario, some a great fans of the concept of buying in the services they need, others are horrified due to the operational and security issues involved. Is it right for your business? It depends on the nature of your business and the proprietory nature of your data, that said at times it does come to mind that many enterprises spend a significant revenue (direct and indirect) on their email, their storage (to name a few), and whether they couldn’t invest that money in more direct areas of the business. It’s easy to say switch the email or that service to a cloud based scenario, we need to balance the marginal cost/benefits, though for the small/medium business I can totally understand why buying in a service could be so appealing particularly when you look at the cost of managing an email system, the email boxes and the backups/restores, “the I want a 3GB mailbox” calls. For the enterprise though, I wonder if a more enterprise based cloud solution might be necessary, rather than have replicated email servers in every region, could we not just have Europe run the email system and every other region connect to it rather than 10 Exchange guru’s in every region plus, regional builds/configurations and support? We’ll have to see, an interesting article, do check it out.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.