"Instead, I needed to say, 'You might have everything you want, but as a good corporate citizen, you need to help us as a company get to where we need to be.' Then, if I had some additional features and benefits I knew they didn't have, I could have made a more persuasive argument from the beginning," says Fuller.

Knowing that privacy and security surrounding Google Apps was a concern of Dominion's C-level execs, Fuller was diligent in obtaining, and preparing for presentation, the necessary information.

For example, Fuller requested that Google host conference calls dedicated to security and privacy. In one of them, he says, they discussed specific questions from Dominion's legal counsel and IT auditor that he had provided to Google in advance. Google also provided his team with a 14-page whitepaper outlining their security approach.

In addition, Fuller says conversations with managers were candid when it came to the cloud and security. "I pointed out to the top managers that we were already using cloud-based services such as SalesForce.com and Web-based backup systems," he says. "I also said that the Google security and privacy system was, in some ways, superior to ours on our best days."

"We discovered that one of our businesses had an e-mail parsing program that received e-mail leads, qualified them based on parsed content and forwarded them to appropriate paying customers," Fuller says. "We needed to discover all these applications prior to a migration to avoid breaking something, especially revenue-producing applications."