As the London Borough of Hillingdon stakes its claim to becoming the first local authority in the UK to move to Cloud Computing with Google Apps, the City of Los Angeles has scaled back its own Cloud ambitions.
LA’s relationship with Google and its systems integrator CSC has been on rocky ground for many months, but shortly before Christmas the Los Angeles City Council voted to scale back its plans after concluding that Google’s technology could not meet the security needs of crucial departments including the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the city attorney's office.
Los Angeles officials originally expected to roll Google Apps out to its 30,000 users by June 2010, in partnership with CSC. But that number has been reduced to about 17,000 employees, largely because of security objections raised by the LAPD.
In a unanimous vote, the City Council decided to change the terms of its $7.2-million contract with Google so that LAPD employees and others will stay on an older on-site Novell email system. Google will pay up to $350,000 per year for those employees to use that system.
When the contract was signed, Los Angeles also received a $250,000 advance as part of an agreement to encourage other cities to adopt the Google system. The city will now get to keep that money independent of whether it promotes the system.
The city will continue using Google's email system for 17,000 other employees, but officials said that Google "does not have the technical ability to comply with the city's security requirements" and that those requirements are "not currently compatible with Cloud Computing."
Maggie Goodrich, Los Angeles Police Department CIO, admitted:
In its defence Google has insisted that the security requirements now being cited were not part of the original brief when it bid for the contract. A spokesman stated:
But it’s clearly a major set back for Google which won the contract with Los Angeles against stiff competition from Microsoft and which has been touting LA as a flagship example of how cities and local authorities can take advantage of Cloud Computing. One US lobbyist Consumer Watchdog is demanding that the city council asks Google to remove a video from the Google Enterprise Blog promoting LA’s choice of Google Apps.
Jamie Court, Consumer Watchdog President, stated:
Court added:
But other US cities continue to commit to Google Apps. Pittsburgh City Council has announced the completion of a move from Microsoft to Google Apps for Government, albeit on a smaller scale – a $400,000 deal involving 3000 employees.
The city will spend $150,000 to $170,000 annually on licensing fees, down about 25 percent from what it has spent under the old system, according to Howard Stern, the city's outgoing CIO.
Interestingly the Pittsburgh deal does include 1,500 law enforcement users, including the Pittsburgh Police Department. Stern said he was comfortable that the Google roll out met necessary security standards:
But he admitted:
For his part, Luke Ravenstahl, Mayor of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, used the Google Enterprise blog to trumpet his pleasure about the move:
Meanwhile in the UK the London Borough of Hillingdon hopes that an imminent half a million pound move to begin using Google Apps for Business means it will become the first local authority in the UK to take this big a step into Cloud-based working.
It has approved a plan to shift its 3,500 staff to using the Web-based applications, which will include email, calendar, documents, word processing, instant messaging and voice and videoconferencing. Hillingdon expects the move to improve internal collaboration and productivity, giving it the scope to develop new ways of working, and produce savings of £2.98m, compared to maintaining the traditional desktop PC, over the next four years.
Another expected benefit is that by reducing the need for local storage and server space to hold email and other data it will be able to reduce its carbon footprint. The move will be facilitated through a contract with Cloudreach, a reseller of Google Apps for Business, to last for four years with the option to extend for two one year periods. The contract has been valued at £540,000 over four years with Cloudreach.
Councillor Jonathan Bianco, cabinet member for finance, property and business services, said:
