I’ve worked with admins who were confident in their skills, but failed to acknowledge the internal vulnerabilities of their own network. For example, at one meeting an admin was bragging about all the security measures, yet “forgot” to disclose all the network rights and hardware access that student techs had, along with the long chain of shared passwords across both time and machines, as well as legacy access from years gone by. And it just got worse when the admin’s security measures and talent overtly paled in the face of what Google employs. Plus, there is only one point of blame when things go south locally, and it usually lands on the overworked shoulders of the head admin, whereas Google’s security layers are extensive, deep, and redundant.
In fact, its rather hard to argue against Google when considering actual numbers. How many districts do you know that spend hundreds of millions of dollars on security and virus protection? Not to mention counting nines on uptime and server redundancy. Google’s lifeblood resides within security and reliability, so its hard to believe that any individual school district has a greater emphasis on email security and uptime compared to Google.
As far as Google mining email, well, so what? (“reading” is a little presumptuous, and I like to joke that I wish they would read my email, and please reply to it!) All commercial services do it, and now with the new NSA facility in Utah, pretty much everything on the net will be mined and archived regardless of where it’s so-called home is located. Personally I would much rather have Google’s bots “reading” my email than a network admin searching for buried bodies, gossip, or AUP infractions.
Along with what Bill mentioned in the recovery of work time when Google services are used, it also follows that the spiraling vicious circle of network control begins to unwind when the immense responsibilities of maintaining the email service are relinquished. To mix my metaphors further, the sysadmins can only stretch so far before snapping at the very users for whom the infrastructure was designed to serve in the first place (and whose very purpose within the system pays for the service).
Depending on your clout with Google, special arrangements can be made. I believe the U of Wash was successful with limiting the undesired access through their agreements. Google is interested in safely and productively moving into the public school k-12 arena especially as evidenced with their “YouTube for schools” venture. The Google strategy for systematic deployment of their products is based on the model (similar to the tobacco companies) of “brand imprinting for later actuation.” If students use the free or school-based Google Tools, then they will be more likely to adopt them (the pay versions) when they’re working in the professional world.
I agree completely that there is a diversity of viable options for email services, and there is some safety in having various platforms to compare against one another. Unfortunately, sometimes other factors enter the equation that are not necessarily exclusively focused on the wellbeing of the enterprise.
It can be very good to outsource to a less expensive, more secure, more reliable, more stable system, especially when even a brief glance at the horizon should enlighten most savvy folk that self-hosting major server operations is nearing the end of its shelf-life. Now that we are over 12 percent into the 21st century, we should start acting like it. If I had to bet on the long term viability of a company, I would not hesitate to place Google well ahead of MS where cloud services are concerned. I use MS at work or when I have to, but Google and others when I need to. There must to be an open discussion about these topics because others are counting us to provide an honest assessment of the best options weighed across many individual parameters. If the discussion is ever shut down prematurely, then likely something else is going on. And its probably just a stubborn opinion wedged somewhere in the gears of progress.
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