By Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Microsoft Federal
This year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC 2010) is the best attended WPC ever, and as Steve Ballmer mentioned yesterday in his keynote, a lot of that excitement has to do with cloud computing. It’s a transformative time in the technology industry, with organizations looking to cloud solutions to cut costs, become more efficient, and engage customers or citizens in more dynamic ways. We’re working with partners at WPC to come up with the best strategies for implementing cloud technology so that our collective customer base has access to these benefits without sacrificing security.
The public sector has been leading the charge into the cloud, and it’s been great to watch government and education organizations embrace this innovation. We’ve already seen huge successes from major cloud implementations at the University of Arizona, NASA, the Kentucky School System and the City of Miami. In the Federal world, the Obama administration has made cloud adoption a top priority from the start, and we’ve been working closely with our Federal partners to deliver on this vision. Two really cool recent federal cloud examples come to mind that I want to take a minute to highlight.
In October of last year, congress approved the Military and Overseas Voting Empowerment (MOVE) Act to ensure that our service men and women overseas have their political election votes counted. As anyone living overseas can tell you, the absentee voting process can be difficult due to things like notarization requirements, the availability of documents, and general information on rules and procedures. The goal of MOVE is to make this process simpler and more efficient, and the Department of Defense and the Federal Voting Assistance Program recently launched an online voting solution that streamlines the process. LiveBallot is cloud-based system developed by two great Microsoft partners - Vexcel and Democracy Live - that allows U.S. citizens to securely register for absentee ballots, track their ballot’s progress and receive notification when their vote has been counted. It’s an extremely valuable cloud-based solution that provides some peace of mind for warfighters that don’t have the time to devote to a complex process. The solution runs Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform and is available to all citizens with an overseas Web connection. In fact, Kitsap County, WA has already implemented the technology for multiple elections and it’s received rave reviews!
Another Microsoft federal partner, Eskel Porter Consulting, has built an automated cloud solution that is transforming the process of public records requests. It’s called Public Records Tracker, it’s being used to manage Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. This solution really simplifies the process by creating an electronic record of each request that can be tracked and monitored for FOIA compliance. Citizen information requests are absolutely essential to the administration’s goals to increase transparency, public collaboration and overall accountability. We’re proud that this cloud-based solution leverages Microsoft Dynamics CRM to help federal personnel provide information to citizens faster and more efficiently.
These are just two examples of cloud implementations that are really improving the way our Federal Government operates!