By Curt Kolcun, Vice President, Microsoft U.S. Public Sector
The public sector just continues to innovate. I’m here in Redmond to kick off our 9th annual U.S. Public CIO Summit and I’m surrounded by technology leaders that have aggressively researched and implemented emerging technologies to better serve citizens. Just today we announced 16 new public sector cloud customers, including the the City of Virginia Beach, the City of Winston-Salem, NC, Portland, Oregon Public Schools, Vanderbilt University, and the City of Alexandria, VA.
When combined with federal agencies like USDA and the Army, and states like California and Minnesota, it’s not difficult to see the trend - some of our biggest, most sophisticated government organizations are finding incredible value in cloud computing.
The momentum we’re seeing is about limiting infrastructure costs, paying for only what you use, being able to rapidly scale, but also enabling improved data sharing and collaboration capabilities. The benefits are clear, but our customers are rightly demanding an “enterprise” approach. The agility and flexibility of the cloud model can’t come at the expense of security, or functionality, or privacy or IT support – the missions of government and education are just too important.
So this week is about sharing best practices and learning from each other. The IT landscape is changing rapidly and the public sector has unique compliance requirements that technology providers and government agencies must navigate together. We even brought out Microsoft CIO Tony Scott to discuss challenges he faces making technology decisions on behalf of a large, complex technology company like Microsoft.
As of today, we’re serving more than 190 state and local government cloud customers in nearly every U.S. state, and a total of more than 3 million government employees are using Microsoft Online Services. These adoption rates are incredible and government is proving that it’s a market that can assess and deploy emerging technology rapidly in order to serve taxpayers more efficiently. Stay tuned to FutureFed this week for more cloud best practices from public CIOs, and follow the discussions as they’re happening on Twitter (@FutureFed) using the #USPSCIO hashtag.
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