In case you've been out of pocket this afternoon (or don't have Twitter), Google's popular free email service Gmail has been down for much of the afternoon. While it's fun to debate whether the outage (and the absence of the ubiquitous Gchat) has increased or decreased productivity for office workers across the country, the outage brings up a salient point about cloud computing and the wisdom of having the government rely on consumer technology.
Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra has been a consistent advocate of increasing the government's use of commercially available technologies, such as Gmail. In fact, as the District of Columbia's chief technology officer, Kundra implemented Google Apps, including Gmail, for all District employees.
But as today's outage shows, cloud computing might present some obstacles for government. Federal continuity-of-service policies require agencies to have constant access to their communications systems to ensure connectivity during times of crises. For the federal government to embrace a commercial solution such as Gmail, the vendor, in this case Google, would have to ensure the service remains active even in the event of an outage like today's.
When I called the DC government they hadn't heard any reports of outages among city employees. So it's possible that those type of protections are already in place. But it's something to keep in mind when discussing the viability of agencies embracing consumer technologies: Unlike the general public, the government simply cannot tolerate any disruptions of service.
COMMENTS
What I find fascinating is that the myth that DC government has" implemented" Google Apps/Gmail is perpetuated by everyone. The fact is that 100% of the email for DC gov is run through an internally managed Exchange enviroment. Some users (10-20%) forward mail to Gmail accounts. Nice to "visionary" enough to manage a pay for (with taxpayer money) 2 separate mail systems so that you can claim to "have gone Google"
-someone how knows the truth
Anonomous-DC guy 09/04/09 09:49 am ET
You think maybe DC didn't notice the *worldwide* Gmail outage because, despite all the press releases trumpeting Google in DC, Exchange is still the city's primary email system (public info - just check the MX record for dc.gov - does not point to Google) and almost no one actively uses the Gmail accounts that were purchased for them ?
Anonymous 09/04/09 08:52 am ET
I have seen ongoing issues with government email systems, including blocking emails from certain domains (at one agency not allowing (by policy) hotmail or gmail emails in at all), rolling outages, the mysterious accidental deletion of people's work email accounts (including once that of the CIO) and emails simply not arriving - being blocked in such a way that there isn't even a notification they were blocked!
Give me gmail any day.
Craig 09/02/09 04:29 pm ET
An error at the VA Sacramento data center last year took down data communications across the entire west coast for two days before it was fixed. So much for continuity of service.
Ray Ballinger 09/02/09 03:24 pm ET
I would heavily caution against using Gmail. A year ago, I opened an email with a virus that stole my password, so I could no longer open my email. After spending 20 or so hours on the phone with low-level techs who were all (1) unable to reinstate my email using a backdoor technique to reset the password, and (2) unable to transfer me to a high-level supervisor, I essentially lost my email and all information that I had stored in it. If this company cannot offer better virus protection and resolution, this is not somethign that the goverment wants to offer as a commercially available technology.
CF 09/02/09 03:21 pm ET
There are other problems with Gmail besides reliability. There are security issues and Gmail’s practice of data mining the emails. I do not believe that they support either digitally signed or encrypted emails. At my office we are required to digitally sign all official emails. In fact we are forbidden to access Gmail or other similar online web based emails. I would be uncomfortable using any of them for official government emails.
If you have overfull email boxes, I would say that you are not managing you email well. I periodically archive my email to my hard disk and remove them from the email box. The really old archive are written to a CD and removed from the hard drive.
Anonymous 2 09/02/09 01:55 pm ET
Plus, if you work for the Navy, we have the glorious NMCI (Navy/Marine Corp Intranet) running our whole IT platform. It is the pits. The NMCI controls what goes on your computer, when and how. The system outage is nearly weekly. The tech support is 6th class garbage of a bunch of script kiddies. A majority of social websites are blocked. So many users are getting BSOD because they constantly push updates that are faulty or bad... and they continue this lousy contract telling Congress it is a success. Give me gmail any day over NMCI!
EdZ 09/02/09 11:12 am ET
ACCESS TO THIS SITE IS BLOCKED
Reason: Social Engineering.
URL: http://twitter.com/
This is the message that comes up for any and all social media sites when a Department of Commerce employee attempts access. More and more these days, there are links contained in legitimate job-related articles (in GovExec and other sources) that we just cannot get to without seeking special permission from the CIO's office. Does anyone know how common this situation is throughout the federal government?
Anonymous 09/02/09 09:18 am ET
As a long time government/military employee, let me assure you commercial industry has a way better track record!
W 09/02/09 08:33 am ET
I find it totally amazing that the government would point to an occasional outage of Gmail to show that commercially available technologies are not ready for government use. I have been using Gmail since it was introduced and I can tell you that it is up more often than the e-mail we currently use in our government office. Additionally, Gmail offers much larger storage capacity than the current 100MB that we are allowed to use. I work in two agencies and have e-mails for both. We have servers down, overfull e-mail, blocked messages due to size and considerable delays in e-mail delivery. "Federal continuity-of-service policies require agencies to have constant access to their communications systems to ensure connectivity during times of crises." If this were true we would not have any of these problems. It is time to start looking outside the government for our IT solutions.
Miles Meyer 09/02/09 07:45 am ET