A little over a year has passed since Colorado's state government switched from managing its own email servers to buying Google's email and workflow apps.
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The move bought the state into the modern era, comparable to what corporations are used to, said Kristin Russell, Colorado’s chief information officer. But the state can’t say with certainty yet what the move has meant financially, Russell said.
Colorado estimated it spent $5.2 million annually keeping up its older systems. How that compares to what it's spending on changing to Google so far isn't clear.
Partly that’s because about 26,000 workers had to be trained to use Google Inc.'s various business apps and functions, and partly because what state workers got access to isn’t really comparable to what they had before, she said.
Switching to Google’s cloud-based email and apps for large businesses meant avoiding the cost of having to buy and set up anything, and it did away with the inefficiencies inherent in an organization that relied on out-dated technologies.
“The advantage of going to a cloud-based system is that there was a lot of the heavy lifting we didn’t have to do,” Russell said. “The technology environment was established and already up.”
