BasicGov / BLOG

My first two weeks here at BasicGov has been full of activity.

The first week was marked by an event that proves the cloud computing model is gaining significant traction in government. The decision by the City of Los Angeles to move from enterprise software (Novell) to Google’s Software as a Service (SaaS) for email and calendaring was a major departure from the, I’ll say it, older way of thinking and deploying software. The discussions about whether this is a good or bad move has been lighting up the internet and is very interesting, but at the end of the day, should the software customer be responsible for maintaining upgrades and best practices implementation anymore.

All in all, this is very exciting for companies like us as it shows other cities that a) change is good, and b) change can happen (as a sidebar, there are documents circulating that do a detailed cost analysis of this decision, if you would like that, please let me know). This is a major event in the evolution of cloud computing and many of my peers are very excited about how this event will influence government software decision making in 2010.

In addition to that, BasicGov is releasing a new product this week and there is an impressive set of products announcements ahead of us. Please sign up for any or all of ways to communicate with you (twitter, blog, newsletter, etc)

We are also preparing for DreamForce, which is an education and partnering event for companies delivering products based on Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform. If anyone is out there on the Force.com platform and sells to local government, I would like to meet you there.

Mike

michael.togyi@basicgov.com

SaaS and Privacy Policy

What’s the difference between privacy and security?  Security is all about who can access your data.  Privacy is about what people can do with the data they do have access to.   How do SaaS providers ensure privacy?

Because personal data is handled and stored by your SaaS application provider, you would want to know that they hold your data in as high or higher regard than you do. What governs and restricts how, when, what can be done with your own contact data and your municipalities’ constituent data (it is your data) is referred to as the privacy policy.

As a SaaS provider with a Salesforce.com partnership, local government software subscribers, not only have their privacy policy aligned with those of TRUSTe, the internet privacy giant boasting the strongest and most trusted privacy policy model in the business, but with Salesforce.com it is actually certified by TRUSTe.  This ensures that subscribers enjoy privacy protections in accordance with TRUSTe’s strict privacy principles, and that all customer information is respectively treated as though it were sensitive and not made available to 3rd parties for their own use.  Data is managed responsibly, while ownership of the  data remains firmly assigned to the municipality.

Click here to read last week’s post about SaaS and security.