Pharma caution warranted with cloud, Google

Big pharma companies--like those in big manufacturing and big oil--are right to be cautious about using Google apps. So says Google apps user and Altium CIO Alan Perkins. Altium is a mid-sized maker of electronics-design software.

Perkins notes in CIO magazine that for every one of his peers who has jumped on the Google enterprise bandwagon, at least one has rejected it for Microsoft. Altium is also an Amazon Web Services user and an early adopter of salesforce.com as a business platform--the company's IT tripod.

The magazine presents a for-and-against comparison of Google apps and cloud migration in telling Perkins's story, as well as that of Macquarie University CIO Marc Bailey. Macquarie has transitioned 68,000 students and alumni, in addition to 6,000 researchers, teachers and administrators, to Gmail.

Bailey offers the following for those considering the choice he made: Work through all legal issues. "We sat down with our lawyers and Google's lawyers to mitigate all concerns," he says in the article. And he's made sure Macquarie's email data is stored in Europe. "Remember, some governments care deeply about where and how you keep your mail."

- here's the article

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