Jaikumar Vijayan has a great follow-up piece about Los Angeles’ plan to move some of the city’s records and services to the cloud. As reported previously, the city’s police department and privacy advocates have raised concerns about the proposal…
Google Inc. this week came swinging at critics who have cited privacy and security concerns in calling on the city of Los Angeles to rethink its plan to implement the Google Apps hosted e-mail and office applications.
In an interview yesterday, Matt Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise, said the angst voiced by consumer groups and others about the Los Angeles project is overstated and based on incomplete information. In fact, he contended that transitioning the applications to Google will strengthen the security of the city’s data and better maintain its privacy.
“From what I know of the city’s operation, this is a security upgrade,” Glotzbach said. “Those who may be unfamiliar with cloud computing see this as a security risk simply because it is new and because it is something different,” he said. Glotzbach said he believes that at least some of the concerns raised originated from Google’s competitors.
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The migration would make Google, which hosts the servers running the applications, responsible for retaining and protecting sensitive health care and litigation data along with criminal and drug investigation records. Since the plan was proposed, critics from various organizations, including the Los Angeles Police Department, the city attorney’s office and public interest groups have raised questions about the privacy and security implications of storing sensitive data in the cloud for access via the public Internet. The concerns received a fresh airing following the recent Twitter Inc. security breach caused by an attacker gaining access to a worker’s e-mail on the Gmail system hosted by Google.
Read more on Computerworld.
Photo credit: Bree, used under CCL