Is Google's "Cloud Office" proposition fit for enterprises?

One University has ended its evaluation of Gmail as the official e-mail program for its 30,000 faculty and staff members— Information Week.

In a joint letter last week to employees, University of California-Davis CIO Peter Siegel, Academic Senate IT chair Niels Jensen, and Campus Council IT chair Joe Kiskis said the school decided to end its Gmail pilot, which could have led to campus-wide deployment, because faculty members doubted Google's ability to keep their correspondences private.

Many faculty "expressed concerns that our campus’s commitment to protecting the privacy of their communications is not demonstrated by Google and that the appropriate safeguards are neither in place at this time nor planned for in the near future,” the letter said.

Google officials, for their part, insisted that their privacy controls are adequate

We disagree - we believe that Google's "Free to Consumer" cloud model does not meet the standards that any enterprise larger than a SOHO (Small Office / Home Office) sort of operation would find acceptable (and even a SOHO has near free and more secure options)