July 26, 2010 By Matt Williams
Photo: Randi Levin, chief technology officer, Los Angeles/Photo by Terence Brown
Google announced a new version of its popular Web-based e-mail and productivity suite on Monday, July 26, that's tailored for government customers and meets federal IT security benchmarks.
The new offering means Google's "government cloud" -- available to federal, state and local government agencies in the company's hosted environment -- is now operational. A year in the making, the government cloud will store the data of government customers that use Apps for Government on dedicated servers located in the continental U.S. At first, only Gmail and calendar will be housed in the government cloud; the suite's other parts will be added to the secure cloud soon, according to David Mihalchik, business development executive for Google.
The company believes Apps for Government -- a package that includes Gmail, calendar, documents, chat, video and other tools -- is the first suite of cloud computing applications to receive Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) -Moderate accreditation. The Barack Obama administration has urged cloud computing and hosted service providers to pursue FISMA compliance in order to bolster and standardize IT security across the government, and to assuage concerns about cloud computing's perceived security risks.
Mihalchik said that FISMA certification required the company to do a top-to-bottom review of nearly 200 security controls and submit 1,500 pages of documentation to the feds. Government agencies that have reviewed Apps for Government's security believe it meets or exceeds the controls in their existing systems, he said.
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