L.A. to Adopt Cloud
The City of Los Angeles is adopting web-based Google Apps productivity software for its 30,000 employees to use.
The 12-member L.A. City Council voted unanimously on October 27th to migrate to the cloud, hiring systems integrator Computer Services Corporation. The move could save the city up to $5 million over the life of the five-year contract.
This decision places L.A. among top public sector operations using the cloud for productivity software. Yet the decision by the council also reflects some ambivalence over security issues and the possibility of data loss: the group voted to include a penalty provision in the contract holding CSC liable if there is a breach of service or the city’s data is stolen.
Recently, Google has had some widely publicized security and availability issues around its email and applications.
Yet, increasingly, despite concerns about outages and data loss, major government agencies are signing up for Google Apps. For example, the City of Washington D.C., the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office, and the Prince George County School District in Maryland are all customers. “Many more were watching L.A. closely, and we look forward to working with them,” said Google spokesperson Andrew Kovacs in a recent E-Commerce Times story.
L.A.’s experience with Google Apps is worth watching. I think a lot of municipalities and government agencies now considering the cloud will base their decision on whether to jump or not. And I’m sure that an uneventful record on security and data breaches for L.A. will help them decide.
