Google launched their Google Apps campaign called Gone Google with so much fanfare. Now there seems to be some backlash against their offering. There were some rumors that Yale is delaying the switch to Google Apps due to security concerns and a Techcrunch post about concerns raised by City of Los Angeles bureaucrats about Google Apps deployment. Today Information Week has an exclusive article about University of California-Davis decision to end Google Pilot citing privacy and security fears.Many faculty “expressed concerns that our campus’s commitment to protecting the privacy of their communications is not demonstrated by Google and that the appropriate safeguards are neither in place at this time nor planned for in the near future,” the letter said
Along with concerns about storing their data on third party providers, UC-Davis officials also pointed to University of California Electronic Communications Policy.
This is interesting from two fronts. One is about Google’s effectiveness in luring customers to their online Office Suite offerings and the second is about the very idea of convincing users to put their data on third party servers. This clearly highlights the work cut out for us, the cloud computing evangelists and the vendors. On one side, it is important for the vendors to go all out to ensure the highest security levels possible in their offerings and, on the other side, evangelists like us should take it upon ourselves to convince people about cloud based services. We need to do a better job of educating users about how it is not all that bad in the cloud world and some regulations may even need a overhaul to keep up with the advances in technology.
I bet close to 100% of the students already use Gmail and will continue to do so, just not under the ucdavis.edu domain. Faculty is a different story.
And for UC referring to compliance to UC policy… it’s not Government policy cast in stone, policies do need to be reviewed from time to time.
But yes, what happened to Buzz and some other haphazard decisions are worrysome…
Ironically, google chrome won’t let me retweet this…
Deb, thanks for pointing it out, we’ll get support check it.
It turns out the Tweetme button did not work because Chrome is blocking pop-ups. There is a little square-like icon to the right of the URL / search box, click it and allow pop-ups from certain domains, then it will work.