Utah moves e-mail to Google Apps for all state employees
Connecting state and local government leaders
The State of Utah recently selected Google Apps for Government as its new e-mail and collaboration platform for all 22,000 state employees.
The State of Utah recently picked Google Apps for Government as its new e-mail and collaboration platform for all 22,000 state employees.
This makes Utah the second state to move all of its employees to the Google cloud, Scott McIntyre, director of state and local government with Google Enterprise, writes in a blog posted Jan. 17. Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead announced completion of the migration of all 10,000 state government employees to Google Apps for Government in June 2011.
The contract with Utah is available to all branches of state government and local government entities.
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“Information technology consolidation has long been a top priority for Utah to improve accountability, reduce costs, and increase services to taxpayers. Its legacy e-mail system was unable to keep up with the increasing demand from staff to access information anytime and anywhere,” McIntyre writes.
The state's Department of Technology Services (DTS) started looking for a cloud solution that could address those challenges in 2010. Through a bidding process, DTS received six proposals. Google Apps reseller Tempus Nova was selected to bring Google Apps to state employees.
Utah CIO Stephen Fletcher said in an interview with GCN in March 2011 that the previous year the state calculated that it could offer e-mail services to agencies cheaper than some of the public cloud providers. However, competition in the market has brought down the costs so the state could consider turning e-mail over to a cloud services provider.
DTS is looking to offer cloud services to cities and counties within the state through a hybrid (private/public) cloud.
“Once the [e-mail] migration is complete later this year, all Utah state employees will use Google Apps, which includes new features and capabilities such as video chats, real-time team editing in Google Docs and mobile support,” McIntyre said.
Moving to the cloud will also reduce employees’ requests for IT support. In addition, Google Apps will provide Utah with increased security to comply with all Federal Information Security Management Act requirements and a more efficient way to comply with government eDiscovery requirements, McIntyre said.