14 DAY TRIAL // The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) will migrate in excess of 120,000 users into Microsoft’s Cloud in one of the largest deals won by the Redmond company. The move is a first for cabinet-level federal agencies, the software giant underlined, noting that it has worked with USDA and Dell to ease the migration away from on-premises e-mail and productivity applications to Microsoft Online Services.
Chris Smith, the USDA’s chief information officer welcomed the deal with the Redmond company indicating that one of the advantages of embracing the Cloud is related to consolidating the existing 21 different messaging and collaboration systems that USDA relies on into a single hosted solution.
“This is really about increasing collaboration and communications across the breadth of 120,000 users in 5,000 offices across the country and 100 countries around the globe to better deliver on the USDA’s mission,” he explained.
“For us a move to the cloud was a question of performance, service, and cost, and this solution will help us streamline our efforts and use taxpayer dollars efficiently.”
The agreement is focused on e-mail, web conferencing, document collaboration and instant messaging, Microsoft explained, involving a range of technologies.
According to the Redmond company, USDA will leverage such Cloud offerings as Microsoft Exchange Online (messaging and calendaring), SharePoint Online (document collaboration), Office Communications Online (instant messaging), and Office Live Meeting (Web conferencing).
Of course, it’s important to note that the USDA will take advantage of a special flavor of the Microsoft Online Services.
The software giant noted that in USDA’s case, Microsoft Online Services have been optimized per the security, privacy, and compliance requirements of U.S. Federal Government agencies.
Just ahead of announcing the new deal, Microsoft Global Foundation Services received its Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA) Authorization to Operate (ATO).
One example of the optimizations for federal agencies involves the USDA’s service being housed on separate, dedicated infrastructure in facilities with limited physical access.
“Nearly every federal agency trusts their productivity needs to Microsoft Office, Exchange, and SharePoint today,” said Curt Kolcun, Microsoft’s vice president of U.S. Public Sector.
“From a momentum perspective, I think this announcement is going to be a phenomenal catalyst to drive more interest from the federal CIO community to think about moving their full messaging suite applications to the cloud with Microsoft.”