Philosophically Secure

According to SC Magazine, the newly released Google business application suite provides greater security than locally controlled applications, such as MS Office. I agree with some of their points. It’s true that application patches to Google’s offerings will be applied automatically by Google. However, how do you, as the customer, know that these patches wont break a feature that you rely on? Regardless, you don’t have the option to apply a patch sooner, or skip it altogether.

Since these Google applications are obviously all web-based, users now have to worry about additional exposure to web-based attacks, such as cross-site scripting. Also, are your proprietary word processor and spreadsheet documents more secure stored on a Google server, or locally? That depends on how well you do local security, but with the Google option the control is not in your hands. A business must rely on Google to keep its data confidential and out of the hands of its competitors.

As for availability, a business that is dependent on Google applications would be in serious trouble if the server went down, or if they were having Internet connectivity problems. I would say keep a frequently updated local backup is a must. Those of us who use GMail are very familiar with the occasional “server unavailable” message.

On the more positive side, I think this could be a great feature to get a business up and running with minimal infrastructure costs. As the business grows and it needs more functionality and control over its information, it could easily migrate to a standard business application suite.