For years Google has been telling us to trust the cloud with our sensitive data. From Google Apps to Google Drive, Google dreams of a world where all our lives in the cloud.
In Google’s cloud, that is.
While Google has long touted the general benefits of running one’s business in the cloud, it turns out Google is far less supportive when it comes to its own IT. While Google has a strong bias toward running its own IT as cloud-based services, it has a very closed approach to competing clouds, according to Google CIO Ben Fried.
Google Hearts The Cloud
Born in the cloud, Google has long encouraged enterprises to follow its lead, in part because cloud offers Google a way to disrupt the staid incumbency of Microsoft’s desktop and server empire. Just last week at a Gartner event, Google chairman Eric Schmidt declared, “Cloud is inevitable home for enterprise computing.”
Not that everyone has agreed.
For years Google has struggled through Gmail outages, accusations that it inadequately protects user privacy and simple breaches of account protections. Yet its insistence that cloud is our inevitable future has not wavered.
Google Doesn’t Trust Others’ Clouds
It turns out, however, that Google’s love affair with the cloud is somewhat provincial. As Google CIO Ben Friend told AllThingsD, he’s far less trusting of cloud computing when it comes to any cloud except his own company’s. On the one hand, Fried wants Googlers using the best possible tools with minimal oversight:
The overwhelming philosophy of my organization is to empower Googlers with world-leading technology.
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