GOOGLE HAS THROWN IT'S HAT IN THE RING to gain more government software business by unveiling a new suite of Internet-hosted calendar, email and other products that meets official US security requirements.

The search engine giant has stated that the latest version of Google applications, or apps, for government had received US government certification under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).  Google says it got its FISMA certification late last week, after having to change a number of back-end security features and protocols. "FISMA has an enormous amount of controls," said Google's director of product management for enterprise, Matt Glotzbach. "Things we did on an ad hoc basis, we needed to do on a regularly scheduled basis. We applied these changes to all our production changes."