We are starting to see some great examples of what you can do with the power of Microsoft's clould. The City of Miami, even when limited by a tight budget, looked for ways to improve the services it offers citizens. The city wanted to develop an online application to record, track, and report on nonemergency incidents, but the application’s sophisticated mapping technology would require significant computing resources. Further constrained by long hardware-procurement cycles, the city needed a cost-effective, scalable solution that would maximize its available resources. The city developed its 311 application on the Windows Azure platform, taking advantage of scalable storage, processing power, and hosting provided by Microsoft. As a result, the city was able to reduce IT costs, improve the services it offers citizens, and deliver those services faster than before. It also now relies on a cost-effective disaster-recovery model, an important benefit in this hurricane-prone region
http://miami311.cloudapp.net/
The City of Miami 311 interactive mapping application is an open government transparency solution for citizens to monitor and analyze service requests logged into the City’s 311 non- emergency reporting system. The application uses three key Microsoft Products: