Back in October of 2009 the City of Los Angeles voted unanimously to outsource their email services to Google. While many other organizations have made similar moves, this move made Los Angeles the largest city in the United States to hand over its messaging services to Google, Inc.

For $7.2 million, all 30,000 city employees would be turning to the cloud for email.

This was a huge win for Google because not only did they beat out their rival, Microsoft, but a successful implementation would easily pave the way for future business with local governments.

Fast forward two years and one Los Angeles city councilman is asking why nearly half of the 30,000 employees haven’t yet moved to the new Google Mail system.

The answer is Google has “been unable to meet the security requirements of the city and LAPD for all data and information.”

Basically, there have been legal obstacles concerning whether or not Google can house law enforcement data, such as criminal histories and data related to investigations, on its servers.

Shame on Google?

From an outsider’s point of view, it looks as if Google is to blame for this catastrophe.

Especially when news stories lead in with headlines like, “Google ‘unable to meet’ security needs of city email.”

However Google isn’t exactly at fault here. They claim that working with the regulations surrounding municipalities, “is so new that the legal requirements around data protection are still evolving — and that some of those regulations came to light only after the contract was signed in late 2009.”

Instead of making the jump, the LAPD and other agencies have remained on their older email system using Novell’s email software with Google footing the bill.

But costs aren’t the only thing at stake. Using two different email systems has caused headaches and productivity problems for city employees, especially the IT department.

Who is to blame?

In all actuality, it is the Los Angeles City Council who is at fault here.

Google provides a product. When a customer wants to use that product, they have to do their research.

Most likely, the question arose at some point, “will our information be secure with you?” And most likely Google answered yes.

But that can’t be sufficient. When you are talking to a salesperson, you need to understand that A) the nature of their job is to sell you a product and B) their legal knowledge will not be on the same level as that of a lawyer’s. Before the vote even came before the city council a thorough review of the product and its adherence to federal, state and local regulations should have been completed by the legal team for the city or an outside agency. End of story.

Best practices

There are plenty of news articles floating around in cyber space about how a school district or government agency dropped the ball when making a huge technology purchase.

A simple search of Google Apps for Government + regulations in the time period of October 2007 to October 2009 returns quite a few results about how Google is ramping up its offerings for government agencies. There are even some pretty high profile publications that covered what Google is doing to get ready for what it hoped would be a wave of government clients.

But if you go past the first few pages of the search results you start to see a different picture. Many more results caution users who need to adhere to specific regulations to stay away from cloud based providers for certain services. Email being one of them.

Of course quite a bit has changed since 2009, and Google has gone a long way to make sure that their products are certified under FISMA (The Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002) so that the federal government regulations that govern email are met.

And while Los Angeles still sorts out its email mess, other municipalities and agencies continue to move email services to the cloud. Some of them successful, some of them plagued by problems.

However one thing that hasn’t changed is that organizations will continue to sign large contract for products and services without getting the whole picture ahead of time.