GOOGLE GOES AFTER GOVERNMENT BUSINESS

By K.C.Bishoppe

Google has been demonstrating a more aggressive stance for some time, introducing new apps for corporations and individual users in its effort to compete with Microsoft's Office suite.

Now, Google is targeting the U.S. government and going after a large piece of the government pie. The questions remains as to whether Google is equipped to meet U.S. government demands for uptime, reliability and security.

After announcing a new set of cloud services for government agencies, Google's CIO unveiled a new Web site that allows government agencies to purchase online applications and computing services.

Inefficiency and high costs are two of the things pushing the government's push to cloud computing. Federal agencies have spent vast amounts of money to set up traditional blogs while consumer with an Internet connection are able to set up and run a blog for free.

The federal government is definitely looking for ways to deliver computing services to users in an inexpensive way. At the same time, reliability, uptime and security are key factors in the government's search and there is still doubt about whether Google can deliver the cloud services needed inexpensively and reliably.