Begin: The eMail Wars

Do you remember back in April I mentioned that we were approaching the tipping point between the traditional in-house (Microsoft) email solution and an external (Google) hosted solution. I think the next 30 months are going to be very turbulent as these two giants duke it out to gain a superior market position in the government cloud space. Check out this article from the Wall Street Journal in which Google is establishing its secure g-Cloud.

While the article doesn't mention which certification Google received, I think it is likely that it is the traditional Certification and Accreditation (C&A). Under the C&A we would be able to assume all of the physical controls are in place like physical access, redundant power, data sanitization. If we used this service, I'm assuming that we (the Agency) would be responsible for establishing the application-level controls like user authentication etc. Also interesting is that Microsoft is creating a cloud solution to compete with Google. So the competition will be between Google Docs and Office in the cloud.

In a side note, I noticed just yesterday that my personal email, Hotmail (Microsoft) which I've had since 1995 has had a significant change. I'm sure Microsoft is very happy with the change, but I'm very near abandoning my Hotmail account because it no longer integrates well with my iGoogle page on my Droid. On my computer, it looks better, with enhanced controls, but on my smartphone when I open the gadget, instead of displaying the inbox within the iGoogle page it bounces me into my inbox. That is not the way I want to consume the service. As such, I'll give them a few days to see if they are going to fix it, but I may switch to use my gMail as my primary personal email and sacrifice Hotmail for all the spam things that I sign-up for.