By Lilia Guan
The City of Los Angeles – California United States of America (USA) has amended its contract to migrate the Los Angeles Police Department employees to Google’s hosted email and office application service – the products could not meet stringent security requirements.
In October last year, the City of Los Angeles introduced a motion instructing the Information Technology Agency (ITA), City Administrative Officer (CAO), Chief Legislative Analyst (CLA) and Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and requesting the City Attorney to provide an update on the efforts by CSC and Google, toward meeting all LAPD security requirements for email migration.
The City Council originally approved a request from ITA to negotiate a contract with CSC to replace the City's GroupWise e-mail system with Google's e-mail and collaboration system, back in October 2009.
While the majority of City employees have been migrated to the Google system, the LAPD had to revert to GroupWise due to outstanding security compliance issues enforced by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) policy.
Council member Dennis P. Zine stated in the motion that the Council wasn’t informed of either CSC’s or Google’s efforts to comply with CJIS security requirements.
“Given that the contract is due to expire in November 2012, an update must be provided to Council as soon as possible,” Mr Zine stated at the time.
In November last year, City representatives from the CAO, CLA and City Attorney met with CSC to discuss the terms of the City's proposed Second Amendment to the Contract.
Both the City and CSC mutually agreed to the changes proposed Second Amendment.
According to the amended contract; CSC will not be required to migrate LAPD and other law enforcement employees to Google Apps and this provision will be removed from the contract; CSC is not required to integrate the E-Subpoena solution into Google Apps; there will be no charge to the City for Google licenses for LAPD or other departments (e.g. City Attorney, LAFD, GSD, DOT, etc.) which cannot be migrated to Google due to CJIS requirements, or a credit will be issued where a charge has already been incurred.
Also the cost of Google's e-Discovery solution in the amount of (US) $3.00 per user will be eliminated in each of these instances: 1) for every City employee that is not migrated to Google Apps and 2) every employee for whom the City determines that e-Discovery will not be implemented.
Although there are approximately 1000 Google users, CSC will charge the City at a reduced per user rate based on 30000 users, regardless of the actual number of users on Google.
However, the City is committed to having no less than 90 per cent of its non-proprietary department workforce that is not impacted by CJIS requirements on Google.
The amendment also states that CSC will not seek reimbursement of the (US) $250000 advance intended as an incentive for the City to encourage other government users to adopt Google.
Google will pay the City for GroupWise costs during the term of the contract and any extensions beyond that, beginning July 1, 2011. Its obligation to pay for GroupWise licenses will be capped at (US) $350000 per year, which is 60 per cent more than current levels.
Despite the issues the City acknowledges that Google Apps for Government (GAFG) is the preferred Google platform for computing needs and all references to Google Apps Premier Edition shall be removed and replaced with GAFG.
In addition, all future orders under this agreement for the City will be placed on GAFG.
Although CSC does not have the technical ability to comply with the City's security requirements, it should be noted that the DOJ requirements are not
currently compatible with cloud computing.
Additionally, while LAPD remains on GroupWise, the remainder of the City, about 17000 users, have successfully migrated to the Google system.
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