14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella has just announced that his company will donate no less than $1 billion (€911 million) in cloud services to non-profits and NGOs in the next three years, thus trying to continue its “commitment to global giving.”
Specifically, Microsoft will begin the Cloud nonprofit program rollout this spring, with a total of $350 million (€319 million) worth of services to be donated this year alone.
Satya Nadella has said in a statement that, with this new program, Microsoft hopes to help organizations and governments “use the public cloud for public cloud,” so in the end, it’s an effort that could support people everywhere.
“The ‘public cloud’ refers to massive, privacy-protected data and storage services rendered over a network for public use. Cloud computing makes it possible to reason over quantities of data to produce specific insights and intelligence. It converts guesswork and speculation into predictive and analytical power,” Nadella explains.
Bill Gates’ mentality
Nadella goes on to provide a few examples on how public cloud could be used by people across the world, as services developed by Microsoft and some other companies have already helped tackle diseases and natural disasters.
“In Nepal, after the devastating earthquake there last April, disaster relief workers from the United Nations used the public cloud to collect and analyze massive amounts of data about schools, hospitals and homes to speed up access to compensatory entitlements, relief packages and other assistance,” Nadella points out.
With this effort, Microsoft seems to mirror the attitude promoted for so long by founder Bill Gates, who’s currently one of the biggest philanthropists in the entire world. Gates and his foundation, Bill and Melinda Foundation, are fighting to eradicate several diseases in poor countries across the world, and now Microsoft’s giving away cloud services that could support these efforts in different parts of the planet.