Google keeps chipping away at enterprise concerns

Last week, the news about Apps was that it was finally offering subscribers service-level guarantees, a much-needed move that was slow in coming. This week, its all about Apps analytics and security. Google announced it has added the ability for enterprise Apps administrators to analyze Apps usage, tracking how, where and when users are working with Google Docs and Sites. It also announced that Apps successfully passed a SAS 70 Type II audit, confirming that the company's technical processes and controls surrounding Apps are up to snuff. It's as if the company finally finished reading a real outsourcer's handbook and is rushing to put the proper features in place.

The new analytics features serve to provide enterprises with a window into how Apps is used in their company. With true usage statistics in hand, they can better gauge just how useful Apps is, and when usage declines, proactively head off problems. The SAS 70 Type II audit, on the other hand, has long been a stalwart in the outsourcer's playbook. Used primarily by claims processors, hosted data centers, managed security service providers and credit processing organizations, it provides enterprises with an independent way to verify that if they place their mission-critical data and services in the hands of an outsourcer, that outsourcer has done everything it needs to do to keep the data secure. (And that's something enterprises have long wondered about when it comes to cloud-based offerings like Apps.)

In the old days of outsourcing, no enterprise would ever hand over any mission-critical process (nevermind e-mail and collaboration tools) to a service provider that didn't provide SLAs or independent audits of its processes. But Google's strategy of going after the consumer market gave it a pass initially. Now it's realizing that if it wants real enterprise customers, it needs to offer real enterprise-level services.

• Outsourcing
• Security
• Software
• analytics
• audit
• enterprise concerns
• Google Apps
• outsourcing
• SAS 70 Type II
• security
• SLAs