City of Los Angeles unhappy with Google’s cloud-based email

A deal between Google and the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles Police to provide cloud-based email and other apps has gone sour. Los Angeles CTO Randi Levin wrote a letter to Google’s contractor for cloud computing, Computer Sciences Corporation, saying the city will not pay Google due to the internet giant’s inability to provide secure email and collaboration…


A press release from Citizens Against Government Waste said the group has been against the deal since privacy concerns were brought up in 2009. The group said taxpayers have been paying for a service that has not been working correctly. As a proposed amendment in the contract, CSC would repay the city through November 12 of next year.

"Taxpayers deserve to know how much this abrogation of the CSC contract has cost them so far and how much more it will cost if CSC refuses to cover the 13,000 GroupWise users through next November," said CAGW President Tom Schatz. "There should be complete transparency about the total cost of running LAPD on a separate system, including support staff, lost productivity through the use of two separate email systems, and hardware and software maintenance."

There are cloud-based productivity tools and hosted email solutions available in the market that provide the security and reliability a company needs in order to transition from conventional desktop applications.