Success in the rapidly changing business of online services depends upon the security and privacy of customer data and the availability and the resiliency of the services. Microsoft diligently designs and tests applications and infrastructure to internationally recognized standards in order to demonstrate these capabilities and compliance with laws and with internal security and privacy policies. Microsoft customers benefit from our focused testing and monitoring, automated patch delivery, cost-saving economies of scale, and ongoing security improvements.

• Learn more about security in the cloud:
  • Blog: ID and security in the cloud
  • Securing the Microsoft cloud infrastructure
    (Portable Document Format file, 577 KB)
  • Help protect anywhere and access everywhere with Forefront
    
  • Learning path for security – Identity and access Management
    

Software-plus-services brings together the best of cloud-based, hosted services and the software that resides on a variety of devices to provide flexible and effective solutions for doing business. With software-plus-services as your IT strategy, you can focus your internal IT efforts on the systems and applications that are most critical to your agency and that leverage your IT expertise. Other systems can be hosted by Microsoft or by a third party which handles deployment, maintenance, and software upgrades and helps ensure that your availability requirements are met.

Software-plus-services offers you unprecedented flexibility and the opportunity to reduce costs, strengthen core capabilities, and increase business agility. Depending on your IT model, staffing, budget, and agency needs, you can choose from three delivery models or a hybrid approach: