Google Apps gets a government edition

Office suite in the cloud is the first to receive FISMA certification and accreditation

Google Apps for government is hardly a novel concept. In October, it will have been a year since the Los Angeles City Council first announced that it had gone Google. A month later, Orlando had done the same.

Today, Google took the next step towards ensuring widespread adoption of its online office suite by announcing Google Apps for Government, an edition specifically intended for federal, state, and local government operations.

Additionally, the cloud computing office suite is the first of its kind to receive Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification and accreditation from the U.S. government. The 2002 law, acknowledging the high risks posed by online security threats, requires federal agencies to place services it intends to use, like Google Apps, under close scrutiny. Having been authorized to operate by the General Services Administration, Google's office suite is all fired up to take over government offices with a smart and efficient set of tools in the cloud.

Kripa Krishnan, Technical Program Manager, Google Apps for Government explains the power of the software to users with global interaction:

Take Berkeley Lab, a member of the national laboratory system supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. It’s managed by the University of California and conducts unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Berkeley researchers collaborate with scientists around the world, so emailing version upon version of documents among collaborators and trying to juggle disparate files is difficult. Berkeley Lab researchers have been using Google Apps to share documents that live in the cloud, and can view and edit documents and spreadsheets simultaneously knowing they are always working from the latest information.

Google Apps for Government is now available for federal, state, and local governments in the United States.