By Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Microsoft Federal
It’s no secret that government organizations, from the local sheriff’s office to the biggest federal agency, are facing shrinking budgets. Public sector leaders are being asked to meet mission requirements with less funding, and more and more CIOs are turning to cloud computing as a way to drive efficiencies and lower operations costs. Governments are finding that they can’t afford not to explore cloud options, and the latest public entity to join the cloud club is a big one – the state of California.
When the government of the most populous state in the country heads to the cloud, it really shows the value that large public organizations are seeing in hosted computing. And an enormous, complex state government like California has many of the same IT challenges that a federal agency has – the need to increase transparency, deliver citizen services more efficiently, reduce energy usage, and improve information sharing. Cloud computing facilitates solutions to these challenges, and can be a real difference-maker as public sector leaders navigate through this extremely difficult economic environment.
The blog post below was written by Gail Thomas Flynn, Microsoft’s Vice President of State and Local Government, and goes into more detail about the benefits California will realize through this statewide cloud implementation.
By Gail Thomas-Flynn, Microsoft US State & Local Government Vice President
As governments continue to deal with persistent budget pressure from what the AP has called the ‘Great Recession’ state and local governments across the country are looking to take advantage of technology in an effort to reduce spending and streamline operations while providing uninterrupted citizen services. In 2009, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his Governor’s Reorganization Plan, which consolidates statewide information technology (IT) functions under a single agency to enhance coordination of IT projects and cost savings.
Today I’d like to point out how California continues to take advantage of the power of the Microsoft platform to realize these goals. Specifically, the State of California has selected Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) to host a state-wide, cloud-based version of our popular email services. Nearly 80 percent of California agency email systems now operate on Microsoft Exchange email servers, and under California’s continued commitment to the Microsoft platform and roadmap, and alongside our partner CSC, hundreds of disparate systems and datacenters will be consolidated in a cloud environment, resulting in reduced operational costs and improved efficiency.
Several state agencies and entities are already in the process of migrating their existing on-premise services over to Microsoft’s cloud services. For example, the City of Carlsbad recently moved its email and collaboration services to the Microsoft cloud after determining that our hosted environment offered a higher degree of security than they could provide internally. After considering other cloud providers, these state entities and the State of California ultimately chose Microsoft for its ability to provide enterprise-ready service for hosting their users with the highest levels of security, support, and reliability as well as the total cost of ownership (TCO) standards the state needed.
Along with several educational institutions in California, state agencies and departments have made a commitment to many of the current and future Microsoft online solution offerings. By moving to Microsoft BPOS to meet its enterprise technology goals, the State of California joins the more than 500 state and local governments in 48 out of 50 U.S. states that currently use Microsoft Online Services. For more information, see the full press release here.