Google Apps has been on the radar for small and large corporations for a while now, offering handy services for free to private users and relatively low prices for corporate uses. With Google Mail, Google Calendar, Google Text, Google Video and now recently added, Google Voice offers a whole lot. The city of Los Angeles might soon be outsourcing its information handling to Google Apps, a proposition that has caused a lot of dispute. "There are a number of security requirements that have to be addressed" says Bob Lentz, CSO for the U.S. Department of Defense, which is right in line with the sentiments of some Police officials, who reckon that "Drug cartels would pay any sum of money to be aware of our progress on investigations." Police and Judicial data is not supposed to move to Google Apps in this proposal though. The proposal went from general skepticism to slow acceptance and it all seems like a decent plan, considering that it will most likely save the city of Los Angeles $13.8 million, but there are some things to worry the tech geek in myself. For example, Randi Levin (Chief Information Officer of Los Angeles), the person who came forward with this proposal, said that "We own the data, not Google" which is true enough, but you are still is storing a lot of sensitive data somewhere that you have no control over. However, in that same sentence, Levin said that Google's security is superior to their own, which is most likely true. Mike Hamilton, chief IS officer in Seattle, broke the whole debate down to its essentials: "My personal opinion is there's still some shaking out to do around this...Some bad things are going to happen before all this gets worked out." If the city of Los Angeles should be an early adaptor of Google Docs, I am not sure, but in the long run, outsourcing city data could be a decent alternative to running a server farm.
Productivity work will however stay in the hands of Microsoft Office for now, as people are used to it, there are compatibility issues with Google Docs and L.A. is in the middle of a five year contract anyways.