Is Gmail Ready for Government?

In case you've been out of pocket this afternoon (or don't have Twitter), Google's popular free email service Gmail has been down for much of the afternoon. While it's fun to debate whether the outage (and the absence of the ubiquitous Gchat) has increased or decreased productivity for office workers across the country, the outage brings up a salient point about cloud computing and the wisdom of having the government rely on consumer technology.

Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra has been a consistent advocate of increasing the government's use of commercially available technologies, such as Gmail. In fact, as the District of Columbia's chief technology officer, Kundra implemented Google Apps, including Gmail, for all District employees.

But as today's outage shows, cloud computing might present some obstacles for government. Federal continuity-of-service policies require agencies to have constant access to their communications systems to ensure connectivity during times of crises. For the federal government to embrace a commercial solution such as Gmail, the vendor, in this case Google, would have to ensure the service remains active even in the event of an outage like today's.

When I called the DC government they hadn't heard any reports of outages among city employees. So it's possible that those type of protections are already in place. But it's something to keep in mind when discussing the viability of agencies embracing consumer technologies: Unlike the general public, the government simply cannot tolerate any disruptions of service.