14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is betting big on cloud, and the company has already signed important deals with firms, organizations, state departments from all over the world to move all of them to Azure or Office 365, so it’s shouldn’t be such a big surprise that the US Air Force too has decided to adopt the latter.
In a press statement today, the US Air Force has announced the deal that will bring a Department of Defense-dedicated version of Microsoft Office 365 on more than 100,000 accounts as part of the broader agreement with Microsoft, Dell, and General Dynamics.
Microsoft says that this deal should help the organization significantly reduce costs over the next three years, and it’s the largest commercial cloud contract in the history of the Department of Defense.
“The capabilities of Office 365 allow the Air Force to pursue the next generation of enterprise services in a cost-effective and efficient way that boosts the productivity and collaboration of Service members. The next generation Information Technology environment will be dominated by users seamlessly connecting to and through the cloud. The lessons learned from the Collaboration Pathfinder will provide metrics to evaluate broader Cloud Service Provider (CSP) solutions,” the US Air Force says.
Deployment to start soon
Microsoft has revealed that the deployment of Office 365 should begin on the US Air Force computers in the next government fiscal year, and will provide employees with access to secure email, calendar, OWA, Skype for business, and other important tools that will help them collaborate and communicate more easily.
Needless to say, Microsoft stresses that this partnership with the US DoD shows that its solutions are extremely secure, especially because such an organization decides to rely on its cloud services for critical activities.
“No organization deserves a more enterprise- and security-ready approach than the Air Force. This announcement shows that when it comes to a trusted, secure, and productivity-enabled cloud, Microsoft is up to the task,” Microsoft points out.
Check out US Air Force’s press release below, and click here to read Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) Strategic Plan that includes investments in cloud services.