Hoping to grab some money away from the federal government’s current $76 billion per year computing and software budget, Google today announced that it has a special version of its Apps platform for official government use.
The online search giant just recently received the level of security certification that is required for vendors of the federal government, and it’s taking no time in taking that all the way to the bank.
Google wants the government to shift away from its current system that stores everything on specific internal servers, up to the cloud where everything could be more easily accounted for.
Google Apps for Government would be just like civilian Google Apps, providing e-mail, word processing, and other software services, except everything saved on the former platform would be partitioned in a separate “cloud” than regular users. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Government apps platform would not be any more secure than the user experience, but of course even regular users have the same level of security that just netted Google a government certification.
“The financial pressures on the government are enormous” and governments across the country “are dying to make this transition,” the Journal quoted Google CEO Eric Schmidt as saying in a press conference.
It would be one of the last frontiers for Google to steal away thunder from Microsoft, which earns billions of dollars in government software contracts every year. It’s not expected to be an easy sell, but with Google, the one thing we’ve all learned by now is that anything’s possible.
