City employees have apparently had enough with their outdated email system and decided to do what most budget conscious emailers have done: go Google. But what is free to you and I cost the city $17.6 million.
The Los Angeles City Council today approved replacing the city's crash-prone e-mail system with a Google-based application. Council members voted unanimously to pay Computer Science Corp. $17.6 million over five years to set up the system that would provide e- mail, document archiving, spreadsheets, presentations, virus detection, disaster recovery and more storage by June 30, 2010.
Testing? Nope, just jump in. The City Council rejected a proposal to test the Google-based system in a single department and evaluate it over six months. Also rejected was a proposal to upgrade the GroupWise system, so city workers can test the latest version before switching.
City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana said staying with GroupWise would cost the city $5.4 million more over five years than switching to a Google-based system.
The GroupWise system, Santana said, has a record of being unreliable and its e-mail program was down as recently as Monday.
Randi Levin, general manager of the Information Technology Agency, likened staying with GroupWise as "an example of trying to fix something that's too broken to repair adequately."
She said the GroupWise system requires 90 dedicated servers operated by 13 staffers at a cost of about $23 million over five years.
With the Google-based system, data would not be stored on city property but in servers at a so-called "Google data centers" managed by people with high-level security clearances.
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The information would then be accessed via the Internet. Google's senior vice president for engineering, Jeff Huber, tried to assuage concerns about security.
"In addition to 24-7 guards, electronic key access and closed circuit video, we employ state of the art security mechanisms such as biometrics and heat sensing," Huber said.
"Also, in a Google data center, your data isn't stored on a single computer. Instead, it is obfuscated and digitally shredded then spread across hundreds of digital computers making its physical theft virtually impossible. In addition, data is encrypted in transit ensuring data is safely delivered," he concluded.
Los Angeles police and state Department of Justice officials have expressed satisfaction with those security measures.
The City also amended the contract so that CSC would have to pay a penalty if there was a security breach affecting city data. No one with the Falls Church, Va.-based computer services giant objected.
About $1.9 million of the cost of implementing the Google-based system was not budgeted for fiscal 2009-2010. However, Levin will close that shortfall using savings and money from an anti-trust settlement with Microsoft.
