Wednesday 08 September 2010
The city of Los Angeles is considering moving away from traditional applications from Microsoft and other providers and switching to Google for its email and other features - all of which would be in the cloud. InformationWeek reports that the city will likely spend more than $8 million on the contract with Google over the next five years, but will see a saving of more than $6 million in licensing fees from Microsoft and Novell over that same time along with an additional $7.5 million in “soft savings.” The contract must be approved with some questioning the security of using cloud computing, but Google says its product would be an improvement over what the city has been using.
Security is at the core of how we design Google Apps, and as the City of Los Angeles’ evaluation report notes, the proposed cloud computing system is an improvement over the level of security currently in place,” Google said in a statement according to CNET. “It also provides other benefits of cloud computing - such as increased innovation at reduced cost - which are driving the city’s request for a cloud solution to suit its IT needs.
The concerns come after sensitive Twitter documents were stolen by a hacker who gained access to a Twitter employee’s Yahoo e-mail account and from there got information that allowed access to the company’s data on Google Apps. Although the breach occurred in May, the severity of the situation wasn’t clear until last week when the hacker fed the data to TechCrunch for public posting. While Twitter executives noted that there was no security vulnerability in Google Apps, the linking of personal and work e-mail by the employee, re-use of passwords on multiple accounts, and easy to guess security questions allowed an outsider to steal confidential information and expose it to the world. Washington, D.C., is the first major U.S. city to sign up for the $50 per user per year service. Seattle, meanwhile, is using Google’s Postini service called Message Security. “Government agencies at all levels - federal, state, and city - are looking to cloud computing as way to advance innovation while decreasing costs,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.
We agree that security is a very important consideration for any organization considering cloud computing, and we’ve been working very closely with the City of Los Angeles to address any questions and concerns government officials or citizens might have,” the statement said. “Security is at the core of how we design Google Apps, and as the City of Los Angeles’ evaluation report notes, the proposed cloud computing system is an improvement over the level of security currently in place. It also provides other benefits of cloud computing — such as increased innovation at reduced cost — which are driving the city’s request for a cloud solution to suit its IT needs.
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