Bloomberg recently released an article that talks about a deal between the US Washington D.C. Government and Google, valued at roughly USD$500,000. The deal, for the government, means that its 38,000 employees will soon be using Google e-mail, Google Docs, and everything else Google related.
This is a huge upset for Microsoft, but I can only hope that they saw it coming long ago. Microsoft’s high corporate costs for licensing is what is causing so many companies to switch over to a far more cost-effective solution that gets the same job done, maybe even better.
Licensing for 38,000 users means millions in renewals and upgrades. The contract signed for USD$500,000, well, you do the math. 500,000 < XX,XXX,XXX.
Additionally, with the entire government on Google’s platform, it means that they can be even more mobile than they were before.
But, this also means that Google has to be even more secure than they already were if they have government data on their servers. This means even more thorough screening of employees at datacenters, more accountability, and just overall a lot more security.
I would hope that Google already has top notch security and very thorough screening, which I’m sure they do, but having government data on their servers will add just a little more weight to the seriousness of it.
October 13th, 2008 at 11:27 am
I believe it’s actually the District of Columbia (the city government, not the Federal government).
October 13th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Yep, it’s the District that is making this ‘leap of faith’. I’d love to see their privacy policy and how they anticipate Google meeting it for the protection of PII and PHI, along with any other financial data they will be transmitting and managing within this open environment.
Hopefully, they’ve given sufficient consideration to the commingling of their workers information with that of all of the other GOOGLE users on backup tapes, etc when Google runs routine backups of data.
Not saying I think it’s a bad idea, would just REALLY be interested in seing how they’ve addressed these issues, along with their emergency maangement needs and vital records protection issues.
October 13th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
@David, ah right, thanks for the correction, I updated it.
@Larry, yeah, I’m very interested as well to see their policies on this. It’s helped step up security for both government and regular users like you and me.