Another government agency is heading to the cloud. The Interior Department announced this week that it will migrate to Google Apps for Government.
The agency awarded a seven-year contract worth almost $35 million to Google Apps for Government provider Onix Networking, which will shift the Interior Department to the cloud-based services offered by Google. Employees will then be able to access email via Gmail and documents via Google Docs, for example. The agency said it expects to save up to $500 million by 2020.
"Implementing a Department-wide, cloud-based email system that helps modernize the ways we do business while cutting costs is good government, plain and simple," Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, said in a statement.
The award comes after Google sued the Interior Department in 2010 for unfair contract practices. As Bloomberg reported at the time, Google and Onix asked the court to stop the Interior Department from awarding the contract to Microsoft without an open bidding process. Google dropped the case in September 2011 after the department agreed to allow companies to compete for the contract, Information Week reported.
Onix Networking will now have to demonstrate that it can meet the Interior Department's objectives for an integrated suite of tools. Once complete, Interior will start migrating more than 90,000 employee mailboxes from seven on-premise email systems to the Google cloud. That's expected to be done by Dec. 2012.
"Not only do we get the features we want in a desired security environment, but our workforce will get the cutting edge technology that many of them use in their personal lives," said Andrew Jackson, Interior Deputy Assistant Secretary for Technology, Information and Business Services.
Today's announcement covers the first phase of the project at a cost of $17,248. In all, however, the project is worth $34,872,728 over seven years, the agency said.
This is not the first time Google has tangled with Microsoft over government contracts. In Dec. 2010, the U.S. General Services Administration decided to move its 17,000 employees onto Google's hosted Web apps. Several months later, Microsoft took to the blogosphere to highlight that the Department of Justice had noted that Google's Google Apps for Government were not compliant with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), a set of security specifications that are designed to cover IT solutions for the federal government. Google denied the charges.
Google's Interior Department win comes shortly after the search giant unveiled its cloud-based storage service, Google Drive. For more, see PCMag's hands on and the slideshow below.
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