As reported by the Los Angeles Times,
the city of Los Angeles is weighing a plan to replace its e-mail and records retention software with a service provided by Google, a move that could allow the Internet giant to retain sensitive records transmitted by the police and other municipal agencies
While this is clearly still in the making, as it needs to be approved by the City Council, it is one of the first times that public cloud services are being considered for a government-wide solution to e-mail. As the article indicates, reservations come from the Police Department, which of course deals with quite sensitive records and information.
Should the deal be approved by the Council, this may turn to be a milestone for local governments across the US and beyond, which are struggling with declining fiscal revenue and subsequently shrinking budgets. E-discovery, reliability, security are typical concerns voiced by government clients who feel that private rather than public cloud services are more appropriate to run sensitive workloads (see Gartner research note, subscription required).
Whether Google and other providers of cloud-based solutions can credibly overcome those worries will determine where the balance will tilt between private and public cloud services.
10 responses so far ↓
1 Bruce Robertson // Jul 17, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Inevitable, indeed.
The NEXT inevitable blog post will be about getting off the cloud when significant gov’t info is hacked, ala the TechCrunch/Twitter kerfluffle (http://digg.com/tech_news/Will_Twitter_Sue_TechCrunch).
And, the cycle continues — chased by wolves in both directions. It’s just a matter of which wolves are growling most at the time.
2 Tom Bittman // Jul 17, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Security concerns are already pushing many enterprises to solutions between the full public cloud offerings and internal offerings – more like traditional hosting (Exchange Online Dedicated, for example). It’s going to take pioneers to find where the “safe” balance lies.
3 Andrea Di Maio // Jul 17, 2009 at 2:36 pm
@Bruce & Tom
Indeed, this is yet another pendulum that starts swinging
4 Dennis McDonald // Jul 20, 2009 at 8:29 am
Another possible angle is that moving to cloud based services at least partly overcomes the cost and complexity of re-architecting legacy systems using traditional approaches to development and integration. See “Are Federal Acquisition Practices Accelerating the Move of Government Computing to the Cloud?” (http://www.ddmcd.com/cloud.html).
5 SmithWill // Jul 20, 2009 at 9:41 am
I would only welcome “Virtualized” government sevices if it meant the bureaucrats went away. In reality, moving services to the cloud is just another way of saying “you’ll like the poor service and won’t have anyone to complain to so shut up and pay your taxes!”
6 SmithWill // Jul 20, 2009 at 9:43 am
Also, technology and complexity are the enemies of freedom. A cloud by another name is a fog bank=obfuscate/concealment
7 Paul // Jul 20, 2009 at 11:35 am
Fears of the ‘cloud’ for computing are irrelevant and unfounded. People, if your info is digitzed, it can be accessed if you try hard enough. When are people going to understand that it doesn’t matter where the hard drive is located, and in fact better it be in a cloud providers datacentre than in a computer ‘room’. Don’t we recall instances of people accessing the Govt. servers? LA will face the cost realities and realities that we live in a digital world now and this ‘bricks & mortar” reality no longer exists.
8 What if government IT (and spending) vanishes in a cloud? // Jul 21, 2009 at 4:25 am
[...] ← Lack of Money Pushes Local Governments Into the Clouds [...]
9 Andrea Di Maio // Jul 22, 2009 at 1:17 pm
@Dennis
You make an excellent point in your blog (http://www.ddmcd.com/cloud.html) where you suggest that the Feds may actually jump into the cloud to replace not only infrastructure but also applications. However I do see very difficult dynamics between state & local government on the one hand and federal government on the other hand. While moves to cloud-based infrastructure or applications in state&local would be primarily motivated by the need to save money fast enough, federal government still has money (or – at least – is not under a comparable budget pressure), so drivers to move to the “cloud” are different and more nuanced.
10 Andrea Di Maio // Jul 22, 2009 at 1:21 pm
@Paul
Your point is interesting and probably makes a lot of sense to many people. I, for one, have written a piece about the concept of “Citizen Data Vault”, suggesting that citizens may be given the option of choosing who is going to manage their data (pretty much like with Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault). However, it is fair to say that all this beautiful digital world made of “invisible government”, “data stored does not matter where”, and endless “mashups” comes to a sudden end when something goes wrong and people hold government – and not Google or Microsoft or Facebook – accountable for inaccurately processing their benefits or losing their data.
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