Schools Vote for the Cloud Using Google Apps
Maybe you didn’t hear about it, but earlier this month University of California Davis ended its pilot of Google Apps for 30,000 faculty and students before a full rollout was to commence because it was concerned about the privacy of data in emails. Apparently, UC Davis CIO Peter Siegel sent a note to employees explaining that faculty “…expressed concerns that our campus’ commitment to protecting the privacy of their communications is not demonstrated by Google and that the appropriate safeguards are neither in place at this time nor planned for in the near future,” according to excerpts printed in InformationWeek.
Despite UC Davis’s decision, Google is celebrating a milestone. As of today, it has 8 million students, faculty and staff at educational institutions globally using Google Apps. (In total, 25 million use Google Apps; so the educational piece of the pie is considerable!) Google is adding muscle to its efforts to sign up educational institutions to use Google Apps, even launching a new site for recruiting schools.
So far, thousands of schools and millions of students are using Google Apps Education, and some of the more famous include:
- Morehouse,
- University of Rhode Island,
- University of Nevada Las Vegas,
- Metropolitan State College of Denver
- North Carolina State University.
Yet, as the UC Davis incident shows, institutions still must be convinced that their data is private and safe – especially the content of emails. It’s not an easy task for cloud services providers, nor for Google, especially, which examines email content to sell advertising.
Yet, for many students, I’d venture to guess that they’re more interested in a constant flow of new bells and whistles added to their productivity suite (like Google’s recent addition of document collaboration) than worry about data privacy. If they’re emailing each other about girls or guys, do you think they’d mind a well-placed ad from a dating service?
Still, as I’ve said many times in this blog, prevention is the best medicine out there. And if you’re in love with cloud apps but still have doubts about performance, cloud monitoring services are the answer. You get an independent watchdog to alert you on a variety of metrics – and in a variety of ways, from phone to email to texting and Twitter.
