Failure to Meet Requirements Hinders LA Cloud Implementation

After two years of trying and thousands of dollars investment, the City of Los Angeles withdrew their plans to migrate the police department to Google’s hosted email and office application. Most of the city departments have already migrated, but the 13,000 member police force is forced to remain on Novell GroupWise because the cloud solution could not meet FBI requirements.

The city contracted with CSC to facilitate the systems integration on 2009, but both CSC and Google failed to meet commitments to implement security requirements again and again. This delay brought the migration of the LAPD to a standstill. Google and CSC both lost a percentage of service fees, and Google must pay for the Novell Groupwise service. The city is so frustrated that they are considering suing both organizations for failure to meet compliance requirements after assurances that the requirements would be met.

Google and CSC claim that the FBI requirements are not compatible with cloud implementations. They also claim that they did not realize the FBI requirements when they committed to the project. But Jeff Gould, CEO of IT consulting firm Peerstone Research, suggests that their excuses are disingenuous. Google and CSC should have known requirements clearly detailed in the CJIS policy document when they signed the contract.
This fiasco could have been prevented if the cloud providers had done the proper research to understand the exact requirements for the LAPD in advance. This raises a fundamental issue for a cloud services. When a municipality contracts with a cloud vender, they should make certain the provider fully understands the various requirements in advance. In fact, this is a lesson that any business should keep in mind when sourcing cloud services. Make sure that both the service that facilities your systems integration as well as cloud provider understand the full extent of requirements in advance.

Integracon is a leader in cloud implementations because our engineers focus on details and delivery. Proper preparation and planning is essential for successful implementation, and meeting all requirements is not optional but essential. To learn more about our depth of experience in cloud service implementation, contact Integracon today. We have the deep experience that is essential and can over a list of satisfied customers who continue to rely our service and support.

Read more at Intergracon Blog