Software vendor Microsoft Corp., US, has reportedly questioned Google's security claims, accusing the latter of misleading the US government. According to Microsoft, Google has been misleading customers about the security certification of its suite of software programmes for governments.
A blog post from Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel David Howard mentions a new unsealed court document, according to which 'Google Apps for Government' is yet to be certified under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). Google's site, however, clearly states that the suite is FISMA certified.
Microsoft's claim comes from documents which reveal that while Google's Apps Premier package did meet FISMA standards, its Apps for Government package did not. The software vendor called on Google to be more open in acknowledging the security fails of its cloud platform. In its response, Google hit back at Microsoft, stating that the latter's claim is obsolete and that the company has already addressed the government's security concerns.
Google has been engaged in a legal battle since last year for the last right to bid for US government cloud contracts. The company was earlier excluded from a deal to service 88,000 Department of the Interior (DoI) desktops. A judge sided with Google's belief that the bidding was rigged to favour of Microsoft, and had issued a preliminary injunction while the two sides competed against each other.
Microsoft's latest move follows its formal filing of a complaint last month against Google with the European antitrust regulators. In its complaint, Microsoft had claimed that Google engaged in a 'pattern of actions' that impeded competition unfairly. The company gave several examples of what it believed were anticompetitive acts.
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