Google Apps Shapes Up Nicely In Spite Of Noise Around City Of LA Bungling

The April 13 letter, addressed to L.A.’s information technology and government affairs committee from City Administrative Officer Miguel A. Santana, notes that during a pilot program testing the Google Apps system, which was deployed by Google implementation channel partner CSC, users voiced frustration over performance issues. The latter also notes that the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) expressed concerned about the systems’ level of security. The letter sheds an early light on some of the key reasons Google has missed the deadline to complete the project.

• One of the biggest criticisms was about slow performance of Google Apps. It has been found that it was partly due to issues within their own network and issues associated with the browsers used by the employees, mostly Internet Explorer. In my opinion, this is not a Google problem.
• The second biggest complaint is lack of functionality in Google Apps. Looks like city employees were using Groupwise before they started the pilot with Google Apps. Many of the employees feel that Google Apps doesn’t match with Groupwise on functionality. Such criticisms are natural when you move an organization from one platform to another. If anything, this is not a Google problem at all. It is the responsibility of City of LA IT to decide whether Google Apps matches their needs and then convince their employees about the merits of the system. Any criticism of Google on this is pretty naive. Such criticisms can occur whenever any IT moves their organization to a different platform.
• The third criticism, coming from LAPD about the security, might have some merit. However, without any details on this issue, it is just a case of my guess vs your guess. However, the recent announcement by Google to separate out the government data from its commercial customers and some security enhancements associated with this move should help Google convince LAPD.

• Government data will be segregated from the commercial customers’ data on secure Google datacenters that are FISMA certified. All the government data is stored inside the US borders
• Google Apps is now FISMA certified. Google Apps is the first multi-tenant cloud application to get FISMA certification. It has received an authority to operate at the FISMA-Moderate level; an independent auditor assessed the level of operational risk as Low. This is a big coup for Google as it will help them not only secure government contracts but also help them convince enterprises that they can trust them with their data
• Best in class data recovery at no additional cost. This is crucial for government agencies as they cannot afford to have any downtime or loss of important data

Central to CA’s cloud security strategy is the launch of new CA Identity Manager capabilities that bring identity management tools to cloud applications. Mann said CA Identity Manager now supports user provisioning to Google (NSDQ:GOOG) Apps, Google’s widely popular suite of cloud-based productivity applications like Gmail and Google Docs. Mann said users can now automate identity management functions, like role-based user provisioning and de-provisioning or self-service access requests to a single system for managing identities, for Google Apps in the cloud as well as applications that reside in-house.