The amount of money wasted by each and every individual agency running its own email services is outrageous. Most government employees get 50-75MB (yes megabytes) of storage space, compared to the 5-10GB of space the online players give for free. Now this isn't about getting these services for free, but simply letting Google, Microsoft, and who ever else wants to bid on a replacement for ALL government wide email services, centrally hosted and managed of course. There very well will be exceptions for secure environments, but the vast majority of the government doesn't need that.
Replace all government agency email systems with gmail or functional equivalent
Tags: email it
Comments (5)
As a retired Federal worker, I can tell you that we are not allowed to use public email addresses like gmail, hotmail, yahoo, AOL, etc. for official government business for basic security reasons regardless of whether we are in a secured environment or not. If hackers can break into or hijack email accounts like they did this year with some hotmail accounts, including mine, they could potentially use any information found for covert intelligence gathering by foreign nations.
I am voting down your idea for this reason.
Google steals everything it touches. NOTHING you place with Google (including your supposedly private stuff on Google Enterprise, the digital Trojan Horse) is safe.
What we really need is CISCO AON for individuals, server-routers, so that each individual, through their lifetime, controls their own information and is both accountable for, and rewarded for the value of, their information.
There is another idea about demanding that no government business be done via private email, which is the equivalent of not allowing government employees to answer urgent questions from their home or cell telephones.
You are both on to a core idea that needs to be implemented in a fashion not now available.
If federal workers are in a position that requires them to respond to urgent question from home or cell phones or away from home, and while traveling, they use government controlled blackberry servers or maybe now can use Iphones to access government email servers over the web.
I want to point out that this isn't about the government adopting gmail (or other functionally equivalent email system) as is, as for the already numerous obvious comments point out, it just doesn't make sense.
What this IS about is reducing the amount of redundant IT services in place throughout the government that are inferior to other existing options, both functionally and fiscally.
And as one commenter has pointed out, once in place, the potential for further enhanced capabilities based on this consolidated set of "data" becomes limited only by ones imagination.
@Bigjimindc... spot on, but you might want to repost the suggestion with that in mind... it's really stupid for one government or one company to try to use and train and support users on a variety of different communication systems, let alone email systems alone!
standardizing on one email system would allow easier security implementations as well as the ability to send standard messages, attachments and files between organizations.
what a weird idea that might be!
now, what are the rewards to the various agencies for having their own communication systems and email platforms? job security for the hordes of support people?
is that the proper function of government? job security for its own employees? what if overhead and efficiency were the measures, explicitly?
never happen, right? the job security folks would squash any changes like that.
nice thought, though. me? cynical? you betcha! i just look at history and results. it's the engineer in me, and the lack of them in government.