hews an

GOOGLE APPS STIRS

GOVERNM
THE FAST GROWTH OF SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE IN THE
PUBLIC SECTOR IS DISP17\CING STALWARTS LIKE IBM'S
LOTUS NOTES, RODNEY GEDDA OBSERVES.
During the past decade, enterprises and
government agencies have progressively
adopted software as a service (SaaS) as an
alternative delivery model to software
applications deployed and managed on-
premise since the days of the mainframe.
This year, more tangible evidence is
surfacing that will force government IT
decision makers to take a closer look at
SaaS as a viable option.
Nowadays the term 'cloud' has
steamroUed its way into meaning anything
remotely resembling IT delivered by a
service provider in an on-demand fashion.
For software, however, the concept of
SaaS - software delivered by a third-party
over the internet and billed as an OPEX
- remains unchanged amid all the hype
about cloud.
And one of the best examples of how
disruptive the SaaS delivery mode can be
is demonstrated by the application we all
love to hate - e-mail. Microsoft Exchange;
IBM Lotus Notes; Novell Group Wise;
what's your poison?
For more than one in five Australian
enterprise and govemment agencies, it's
Gmail, yes, Gmail. After a relatively short
me in the business market, what began
as Google's consumer Hotmail competitor
has taken on the big guns of corporate
e-mail in the form of Google Apps. Google
Apps now runs second only to Microsoft's
Exchange in enterprise and govemment
market penetration.
The interesting thing about the rise
of Google Apps is not the fact that it's
just another groupware suite, it's the fact
that it's a pure cloud service. So when
you compare the number of on-premise
installarions of Notes and Group Wise to
those of Google Apps it's several thousand
to none. Google Apps overtook Notes and
Group Wise not because it was better, but
because it was easier (and perhaps had
lower upfront costs as well).
BIG QUESTIONS FOR
GOVERNMENT
From an IT standpoint, the decision to
use a SaaS or on-premise application
relates to delivery model and whether
the technology is an appropriate fit for
the organisation, but in government the
decision to use a cloud service relates just
as much to
policy and
privacy than
technology.
In the case
of e-mail there
are now plenty
of stories of large-scale
enterprise and government
deployment of on-demand services,
namely Google Apps and Microsoft's
recently released Office 365
platform. And let's not forget
RIM's BlackBerry has been sending
e-mail data offshore for years
now. In NSW, the Department
of Education went with Google
Apps over Exchange for its student
e-mail service.
So while there are local, state and
federal govemment entiries already
using cloud services, a number of
fundamental risk factors impact
decision making.
The first is the biggest
strength and weakness of
SaaS as a delivery model
- sovereignty. At the
end of the day, SaaS
architecture is a fully
outsourced delivery
model so if the provider
is in complete control of the
subscriber's data and application all of
the time. For many organisations this
is a good thing, but for government
departments concerned about how their
data is managed and secured, this, can be
a road block.
That's not to say the security and
uptime of SaaS providers is poor, but if
you control the application and data,
you can engineer a very high level of
availability and make sure you always
have access to the information in the
event of a network outage.
Security is also a problem in the cloud
when it comes to political hacking,
further adding to the decision making
headache for government CIOs. With
cloud sites harbouring so much data
they have become well known targets for
attackers. And it will increasingly be the
job of the cloud providers, not IT staff, to
keep unwanted visitors out.
NO END IN SIGHT FOR
SAAS SUCCESS
Despite the drawbacks, the adoption
of SaaS by Australian enterprise and
government organsations is set to
continue with between 10 and 30 per
cent of CIOs expecting to move on-
premise software to the cloud, depending
on the application.
Google has shown us that a change
in delivery model, not just competition,
results in the biggest disruption of the
status quo. SaaS is now an established
delivery model and will compete, with
varying success, against both established
and new on-premise applications. The
challenge for govemment agencies is
finding the right balance between the risk,
regulation and reward SaaS presents, GN
RODNEY GEDOA IS A SENIOR ANALYST AT TELSYTE
COVERING ENTERPRISE AND GOVERNMENT ICT
14 I GN I OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2012
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