America's New CIO Loves Google 208
theodp writes "On Thursday, Barack Obama tapped Vivek Kundra for the post of Federal CIO, giving him responsibility for establishing and overseeing enterprise architecture across the federal government. So what might that look like? Well, little more than a month ago Kundra was slated to sing the praises of Google Apps to government officials in a webcast. A Kundra quote from the presentation slides: 'Why should I spend millions on enterprise apps when I can do it [with Google] at one-tenth cost and ten times the speed? It's a win-win for me.' You can follow Kundra's love affair with Google on YouTube, from his announcement of the Google-Washington DC partnership he brokered through a co-starring role with a Google attorney on a video pitching Google-enabled technology for the Obama Administration. Not surprisingly, some say Obama's choice of a Google-party-goer who worships Google could cause big headaches for Microsoft."
Re:google running our government IT? (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't. We might actually have access to our own damn documents this way.
google apps? (Score:2, Interesting)
No responsible business (or government!) would use Google Apps. Would you want all your most important company data, as well as all of your customer's information, in the hands (and datacenter) of a search company?
Re:google running our government IT? (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? Uh..it's been done for close to 40 years. The government has been using offsite contrators with mainframes and servers at corporate locations since the 60's.
What's the fuss? Google is a contractor like any other out there that deals with the government and has to abide by the same rules. Your data is as safe with google as it is with any other contractor that works onsite or offsite with the government.
Re:google running our government IT? (Score:1, Interesting)
"I would prefer if our government leveraged Google's superior and private workforce and farm of server hardware that has proven itself than try to build the infrastructure from the ground up."
Superior to what? Maybe what we have now, but that's like saying you live in a tent and are moving up to a hut.
And why only Google? Isn't that fascism? (socialism and fascism are eerily similar in results, but I'm an idiot, right) Even our defense industry, which has major flaws, isn't so woefully dependent on one provider.
This smacks of AT&T during the telephone era. We had enough of that. We've moved beyond that with computing and infrastructure. I don't want to return to that crap.
Google is a decent company, now. But they've made a lot of moves that are crappy in my book since there "do no evil" talk. I've heard their CIO speak, and it's sickenly left wing (if we combine this, and this, we get cost savings, can do so much, and don't worry about your data being in one place, or if some other tech comes along that is better, we'll be here for you).
Yeah, Google, the company that keeps products in perpetual beta, supplying the government. Google, the company that hoards private data for years, supplying the government. Yick, Google to the US as IBM was to Germany...
There is a reason why paper is often better than an electronic trail people. You can secure paper. You can burn paper. Frankly, I'm not looking forward to the mob outside my door in 10 years when they find I was treated for genetic disorder Z because some hacker found 1 loophole in Google's hit and compromised the entirety of the database, while some ridiculous anti-Z movement is going on. I don't want a consolidated database, I want it isolated from them and corporations.
Re:google running our government IT? (Score:2, Interesting)
Exactly... It's the move to a more transparent govt. of course. No more need to file that silly Freedom of Information Act form. Everything will out in the open.
Silly citizen. FOIA doesn't apply to private entities. And if Google doesn't want to be transparent, well, no FOIA is going to make that happen.
It might also lower the barrier to the gov't strong-arming Google for personal information on the users.
Now, get back to work so you can pay your entire wage in taxes, komrade.
Re:Am I the only one who cringes at "America's CIO (Score:1, Interesting)
Funny you should say that. I'm the developer who is writing the new "clean up deleted files" code behind Google Apps, and I'm personally responsible for making sure that your statement is wrong. There are two reasons why Google doesn't keep everything around. One is public, and the other is common sense.
1) There is a retention policy as a part of the SLA, and if we're found in flagrant violation of the retention policy, it could be actionable. Bad for Google.
2) That's a LOT of data to keep around, and data storage costs $$$. If we were to keep around full history on everything stored in Google apps, our costs would rise substantially and if you've been paying attention to news about Google, you know that Google management is currently (and correctly, IMHO) obsessed about costs.
So we absolutely do delete your files. Our public retention policies state that we keep your data around for a short while, just in case you want to undelete or whatever. After that period of time, we're eager to reclaim those resources and put them back to work.
Not America's CIO (Score:3, Interesting)