Google Apps for Gov battles fear of floating data

Google Apps for Government is designed to meet the information-security laws that bind federal agencies. But it's also meant to provide a kind of comfort blanket for any government agency — from the federal level down to the local — that's wary of moving their data onto third-party servers in the so-called cloud. "There is a …

[Anonymous Coward]

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

Given Google's close association with the current US administration, a government rubber-stamp is less than reassuring for me personally.

[JP19]

Nice

I spoke to a guy from LIEconomy.com, he said he will have a full review of the Gov apps at

http://bit.ly/aAVFPm

very soon.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who's lying here?

"Google president of enterprise" says that government data is secure and not sold to highest bidder immediately and CEO tells us "you have no privacy" meaning _everyone_.

Which do we believe, or neither?

[Paul Crawford]

Meanwhile in the rest of the world...

This makes no real difference. Even if Google offer an "EU only" back-end, for example, as a US company they are still subject to secret US subpoenas for data held by their company ANYWHERE.

Also, who really wants to jump from Microsoft's money-grabbing vendor lock-in to Google's "free" data-grabbing vendor lock-in?

Cloud only makes sense when you have a pain-free choice of migrating back and forth between two suppliers. So far I don't see that.

[lglethal]

What could possibly go wrong?

What could possibly go wrong in handing over huge amounts of government data to a company that has been shown to have a contemptible attitude to privacy and security concerns and will host all this data on internet accessible servers???

[Anonymous Coward]

How soon before

they get ads?

Ooh what is that you are accessing Mr Police Officer? A felony arrest record?

Queue ads for lawyers!

[Sirius Lee]

It's people

So what if the infrastructure is secure. No one has realisticallly been able to hack a secure application for years. The problem isn't hard/software security it a problem with wetware security. It's why we have inboxes flooded with phishing emails, we're the weak link.

So who *exactly* is going to manage and have administrative access to such applications regardless of whether the apps for the US, EU or elsewhere? Because the people who manage these application have access to the data regardless of the security and encrypytion in place. So what controls are in place to ensure the staff are appropriate?

Based on experiences in the UK, its been a challenge for companies which provide services to the NHS to ensure the quality of their personnel. Sure governments have the same issue but at least they also have ultimate responsibility.