​The cloud can enable your government to do its computing without the burden of having to manage servers, infrastructure, and software deployments. All of the infrastructure that has been traditionally managed onsite can now be done in remote locations via the cloud. This change allows you to focus on your government business, not IT management.

Datacenters and infrastructure that are complex and unwieldy are difficult and expensive to maintain, and do not fully deliver what your government needs. Reduce spend in technology through the consolidation of infrastructure costs while also reducing your energy footprint; a key element to demonstrating alignment with “green” initiatives and sustainability.

Services in the cloud offer flexibility and the opportunity to reduce costs, strengthen core capabilities, and increase business agility. The cloud allows organizations to pay for what they use and if necessary, scale to accommodate variable loads across applications and the network. Already supporting over 500 government entities, Microsoft’s cloud services can quickly help implement online communications and data transfer, internal and external portals for online interaction and publishing, document management, and customer relationship management without sacrificing security and privacy - in minimal deployment time.

Consolidating your datacenter infrastructure will reduce complexity and cost. Reducing the number of servers will help lower energy bills, negate the need for server hardware, and lower costs while improving your IT department’s efficiency and responsiveness.

Microsoft is a key supporter of standards that provide the building blocks for open, interoperable cloud services, and developer choice of programming languages. We support data portability and believe customers own and control their data, no matter where it resides.