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We recently went through the process in the ministry I am working with about whether to continue with our MS Exchange mail service or move to Google. With Google apps you can manage up to 3k users without really paying much. Given our situation, around 2k expecting to jump to 5k in the next 5 years, after crunching the numbers, Google was a far cheaper solution than MS and managing it ourselves or even using their MS Online Exchange service.
But the problem is they would have our data now and are in charge with how safe they want to keep it. Google is known for releasing data to the Government and given the ministry's religious views we had concerns about this. Being Christian and thinking about the future our leaders were concerned that because we oppose certain policies that our government condones we could actually be profiled as threats. And because of our international presence(many international people visiting) we already have them knocking at our door.
In closed countries emails get filtered and read by government agencies and people get arrested because of the government's close eye on it's people.
So my question is, does anyone else have concerns with releasing their ministry's information to companies that can easily be monitored by the authorities and is this something we need to guard more carefully? What is your thoughts?
At our location we felt that
At our location we felt that the need to simplify and manage cost out wayed the risk. We just moved to gmail from exchange a couple months ago.
Personally I don't think its any less safe. The abilty for our exchange server to be monitored/hacked is just as possible for a government as it is for them to get the information from google.
Just wondering if you could
Just wondering if you could explain the basis for your thoughts on this. Not disagreeing, necessarily. We've considered this solution as well.
GMail, cost, quality of service, and security
Using GMail has both positive and negative security aspects. In areas hostile to Christianity, use of just plain gmail.com or similar email addresses instead of addresses in domains associated with Christian organizations can be a security plus. Of course, if you use gmail with your own domain name (like I do), then you lose that anonymity, but in my case, it doesn't matter. For some people, it does. Either way, if there is something in email that could get someone hurt by a violent enemy of Christ, then it should be encrypted with Gnu Privacy Guard or use email on a trusted server in a safe country. For the most part, though, my gut feeling is that GMail is fine, as long as you use encrypted connections (TLS/SSL) to the server. Microsoft Exchange has its issues, too, and isn't a secure email hosting system by default. Plus it costs too much, and isn't as good at spam filtering and virus filtering as GMail unless you keep maintaining add-ons, and even then, Google gets the award for best spam filtering.
In other words, I'm in favor of using GMail email hosting services for the bulk of our email, plus the possibility of a more secure server (not Microsoft Exchange and not easily traceable to a Christian mission organization) and/or end-to-end encryption (i. e. Gnu Privacy Guard) for extra sensitive situations.
For more, please see my article on email security for missionaries.
Aloha,
Michael
http://mpj.us
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