Google Apps Misses Los Angeles Deadline

Not long ago Google was celebrating the win by scoring a big contract to move the City of Los Angeles away from Microsoft Office and to Google Apps for only $7.25 million. But now the search giant has missed a critical deadline for full implementation because of security concerns, which spells trouble for other companies considering “Going Google,” and for cloud computing in general. Google is now on the hook for reimbursing the city about $135,000 in extra costs while the L.A. continues to use Novell. According to MarketWatch, more than 100,000 city employees have made the switch to Google so far, and the police department will make the switch next. The problem for the police seems to be meeting California Department of Justice security requirements; specifically “segregation of city data from other data maintained by Google.” Background checks of Google employees working in the system, and e-mail delivery delays also seem to be sticking points.