US state of Wyoming adopts the cloud with Google Apps

Wyoming's Governor Matt Mead has announced that the state of Wyoming has completed its transition to Google Apps for Government. The Governor cut a networking cable instead of the traditional ribbon to makr the migration of his state government to a cloud-based platform.


Since the state first declared its intention to go Google eight months ago, Wyoming has worked quickly to move all 10,000 state employees onto Google Apps, making it the first state government in the United States to fully embrace the Google Cloud computing offering. The entire state government of Wyoming now shares a common email, calendar and document system, allowing easy collaboration between employees, which will include text chats and video for face-to-face interactions and shared work on documents.

Google said the move will also save taxpaying Wyomingites approximately $1 million each year, costs that came with running various email systems including Microsoft Exchange and Novell GroupWise. The Google Apps for Government version comes with a Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification, 25GB of storage per user, Google Docs, Calendar and web page facility called Google Sites. Servers for Apps for government are hosted solely within the United States and are physically separate from other severs that provide the Apps services to business customers.