FERMANAGH District Council has become the first public body on the island of Ireland to switch its entire mail system to a public cloud, according to Baker Security Networks.
The council has moved to the Google Apps platform, meaning its mail will no longer be managed locally, but instead stored on a remote cloud server.
“The solution they’ve gone for has the potential to be their entire office environment but initially they’re just using it to replace Lotus Notes for email,” said Robert Baker, chief executive of Baker Security Networks.
Google Apps has become an increasingly popular option for businesses looking to cut costs, as well as make their mail and office applications accessible online.
Last week, Baker signed its 100th apps business customer and says it supports more than 90,000 Google Apps users.
Mr Baker said there is a lot of pent-up demand from public bodies in Ireland who want to use similar technology.
“County councils seem to be particularly up to speed on this because they’re under a lot of financial pressures,” he said.
“They probably realise that the cost of them running the infrastructure is just too great for what the return is.”
At present, such bodies are not allowed to make such a move due to requirements around data sensitivity. Mr Baker said he was hoping that public cloud systems such as Google’s would soon be an option for a number of State bodies in the Republic. He said the information in question rarely required such restrictions and cloud hosts such as Google and Microsoft tended to have the best security systems. “We had an art gallery who wished to go with us for a cloud-based system, but were precluded from doing so because the information they were handling was deemed to be too sensitive,” he said.
Fermanagh District Council could move to Google Apps, however, because the British government has deemed most email communications to be of a low threat to the state if made public.
It has devised a tiered system to categorise the sensitivity of information, breaking them into six classes or “impact levels”, to decide on their secrecy.
The first two classes – up to anything that would cause “significant distress to individuals, adversely affect the effectiveness of military operations or compromise law enforcement” if released – can be stored on a public cloud.
