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Over on the Official Google Enterprise Blog, they've announced that you can now sync your Google Apps account (premier and education only) to your internal LDAP environment.  This is great news for those companies that have been scared to go the Google Apps (or SaaS route for that matter).  One of the major concerns that people have are for security.

The top 3 questions that I always hear when discussing Apps with someone are:

1. How do I know that my data is securely stored at Google?
2. What happens if Google is down?  How do I get to my data?
3. How can I make this change-over as easy as possible for my user-base?

Google has answers for 1 and 2 (even if Offline is still in Beta).  For number 1, Google has some really great docs (you have to be under NDA) about how their systems work.  This includes their SAS70 certs and SSL encryption for accessing your data.  As far as number 2 goes, they offer email, calendar and docs offline now (in Labs) and you can also use Google Calendar Sync and Outlook to make sure your email and schedule are stored on your local machine at all times.

Number 3 was always a difficult one.  There were tools out there already that allowed some back-end syncing to LDAP but nothing that had been announced from Google directly.  It's great to see them working on making the transition from traditional systems to Google easier for the end users.

As far as security goes, the blog reads:

This new utility is a software component that helps maintain security by running behind the firewall and pushes directory information to Google Apps – including mailing lists, groups and user aliases – to match the organizational schema in the LDAP system.

This means that your data is sent securely from your system to Google without having to open ports for Google to connect to.  This is a big win for many organizations as security is (or at least should be) top priority when it comes to their intellectual property.

If you haven't checked out what Google Apps can provide for your company yet, they have some great information over on their site and a quick search will send you to countless more articles on the switch over.