Google Apps: Here I Am

At Tech Labs we are constantly working to get to know all the major Cloud Computing providers and thier virtual wares. Microsoft, Salesforce.com and of course Google.

And Google is well on it’s way to building a reputation and trust that an enterprise can live with. The Google Apps web site already claims more than 1 million businesses running on the platform.

I sat down with one of our consultants to understand some of the details behind Google Apps and what it takes to properly implement the product for an enterprise.

Some of our conversation:

1. What is Google Apps - in your words?
Google Apps is a suite of products. You get Gmail, Talk, Calendar, Docs, and Sites - all of which are part of the $50/user/year licencing fee. Storage allocation is 25GB per user. The first foray for most clients is likely Gmail and Calendar and its not unusual to see "silent rollouts" of Google Docs and Googles Sites as collaboration tools.

2. Security is one of the benefits touted by using Google Apps? Explain.
Gartner estimates over 20,000 to 30,000 samples of potential malware are sent for analysis each day. And more than 5 million U.S. consumers lost money to phishing attacks during the 12 months ending in September 2008, a 39.8% increase over the number of victims a year earlier.

Gmail is likely to stay more up-to-date with email filters that can spot malicious file attachments and URL filters to inspect for exploits are vital. However even that line-of-defense will suffers from the delay in finding and blocking zero-day attacks. Other cyber security capabilities will be needed.

More than half of employees who left their companies in 2008 took some sensitive corporate data with them. Nearly 80% of these employees said that they knew it was against company policy to take the data, but they did it anyway (source: Ponemon Institute & Symantec). One source of data leakage is email messages that are used to exchange files loaded with hyper-sensitive information.

Google Apps store documents in the 'Cloud' and instead pass around hyperlinks which point to documents that can only be shared with those that you previously granted permissions. Google Message Discovery and Google Message Security offer security and archival features that advance compliance requirements.

Still questions abound such as government and regulatory compliance and service levels

2. Where do you think Google Apps is headed in the enterprise?
Google Apps lineage is of course consumer-focused, however it is evolving rapidly with each major release.

At the sametime it is still not as feature rich as existing offerings by mainstay vendor such as Microsoft.

Microsofts Business Productivity Online Suite (Microsoft BPOS) is appealing because it is available in both a pure SaaS model and a dedicated version. The advantages include custom security, adherance to compliance mandates and the ability to tailor features.

Google Apps is advertised is a SaaS offering ideally to avoid one-off deployments. Users only have the option to get the same release. A pure SaaS offering has to carely balance the desire to quickly mobilize new features and get them safely deployed into production.

Finally a key success factor to the roll out of Google Apps within an enterprise is to have a solid training and communications plan and strategy to allow for a smooth user adoption.

Thanks Jonathan Hsu!