Back in October, the Los Angeles city council approved a $7.2 million deal to switch to hosted Google e-mail and application services.
Now, according to a blog post from Google, the deal is done, and the city of L.A. is now officially in the cloud, with 34,000 of the city’s employees switching to Google’s online services for e-mail and collaboration.
In the post, Google highlights the upsides of cloud computing:
“The cloud computing system will improve the security and reliability of city email, transitioning from servers in the City Hall basement to hosted, secure data centers. Employees will also have a new avenue for collaboration with Google Apps in the cloud: sharing docs, sites and videos and editing them together in realtime as they work on making the city run more smoothly and efficiently and thus better serving Angelenos city-wide. Furthermore, (…) moving to Apps would mean less taxpayer money spent on IT – valuable budget that can be rededicated to other city efforts over the next few years.”
Be that as it may, cloud computing carries certain perils; one only needs to remember the recent T-Mobile/Microsoft Sidekick fiasco, where customer data residing in the cloud was almost lost forever. As large corporate and government-related entities switch to cloud computing, mistakes like that will be greeted with very little tolerance.
In the video below, L.A.’s Chief Technology Officer Randi Levin talks about the details of the deal.
Image from Peter Kaminski on Flickr.
Tags: Google, Los Angeles
Read More... [Source: Mashable!]
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