Yesterday, GSA finished migrating all 17,000 of their employees to cloud-based email. The federal agency is the first to make the switch to Google-powered email. The move is expected to cut IT costs and increase productivity for agency employees, according to Government Technology.
Martha N. Johnson, administrator of GSA, said going to the cloud will save GSA millions annually in taxpayer dollars.
“We expect that using a cloud-based system will reduce e-mail operation costs by 50 percent over the next five years and save more than $15.2 million for the agency in that time,” Johnson said in a statement.
Other benefits of using Google Apps for Government include increased uptime and availability of agency data and collaboration capabilities such as remotely connecting to colleagues through video chat and shared documents. In addition, mobile devices were also moved over to the system.
GSA Finishes Google E-Mail Deployment
Anyone familiar with Google’s suite of products knows that Gchat and Google Docs can be huge time-savers and allow you to communicate from anywhere with an internet connection. GSA’s new email system also includes enhanced security features and is FISMA-compliant. However, putting government email and documents in the cloud also raises records retention and FOIA issues, but the savings and productivity gains might be worth the trade-off. Do you think we will see more agencies switch to cloud-based email?
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