> Google Apps, on the other hand, store data on Google's servers. "That's probably our biggest stumbling block to going bigger with Google," Simpson says.
This is a huge problem for many companies. Some documents you really don't care if Google stores or not.
However our compliance officer told us that we can't by law store rough drafts of our annual report or any spreadsheets dealing with unreported numbers on any servers but our own.
Google really needs to address this issue if it wants companies to move fully to it's solution.
I'll second this. We've been experimenting with Zoho Office which has an API (at least for it's most important apps). I'm shocked that Google (a company with way more resources) hasn't at least matched what Zoho is doing in the space.
Either Google needs to put all their apps on servers inside your perimeter or compliance laws need to change to allow companies to store data in the cloud as long as there are reasonable security measures. I would bet on the latter. In the end it won't be just office-in-the-cloud that drives the change but also S3 and EC2.
Exactly. GE may have the resources to safeguard data on its own servers better than Google could, but the average small/medium business almost certainly does not.
The over all problem is that only a certain set of people should have access to non publicly disclosed data. Putting this data on another companies servers is a gross violation of the law.
If a Google employee can see the raw data that belongs to a Google Docs user then Google Docs will never be sufficient for fully replacing locally installed software.
Your compliance officer said that?
These guys http://www.boardvantage.com/ have hundreds of customers using their hosted solution just for that, holding unreported numbers for reporting.
This is a huge problem for many companies. Some documents you really don't care if Google stores or not.
However our compliance officer told us that we can't by law store rough drafts of our annual report or any spreadsheets dealing with unreported numbers on any servers but our own.
Google really needs to address this issue if it wants companies to move fully to it's solution.