The good news is that cloud-based technology can help. With the Microsoft Government Cloud Platform, a dedicated, end-to-end cloud platform specifically designed to meet rigorous government demands, governments at all levels can operate more efficiently and cost-effectively. And they can make their budgets stretch further even during a time of continual cutbacks. Consider the following examples:

Citizen websites: As citizens demand round-the-clock access to public information, governments have responded by creating automated services that citizens can access anytime, anywhere. Yet as the number of these services grows, the underlying infrastructure becomes more complex and expensive to manage while the risk of cyberattacks increases. By migrating their citizen-facing websites to the Microsoft government cloud, governments can improve security while reducing their capital costs. Moreover, they can increase use of these services by adapting them for mobile devices right from the start.

Video storage and streaming: Today, an increasing number of government agencies are incorporating video into their day-to-day work. Governments are using video to disseminate critical information both to employees and to the general public. For example, they are using it to monitor activity in buildings, transit systems, and other places around the community. And law enforcement agencies are deploying it through body-worn cameras to record their interactions with the public. As organizations turn to video to inform their work, the cost of storing and streaming it presents an unprecedented challenge. The Microsoft government cloud only charges governments for the storage they use, offering them a more cost-effective way to manage video footage than storing it on-premises. It also provides them with powerful and highly scalable cloud-based encoding, encryption, and streaming components.

Datacenter consolidation: Over the years, governments around the globe have been purchasing real estate and infrastructure to house their datacenter operations. And as the number of datacenters has proliferated, the cost of maintaining them has become increasingly expensive and complex. Many governments have begun to address this issue through consolidation. For example, several years ago the US federal government launched an initiative to save taxpayers billions of dollars by shutting down underutilized datacenters and shifting IT investments to more efficient computing platforms. By migrating their datacenters to the Microsoft government cloud, governments can contain costs by rapidly scaling resources up and down as their needs change, while securely storing data.

Open-source software and Linux: Many government agencies are using a combination of Linux and other open-source software and commercial products. As they move their workloads to the cloud, they want to be able to maintain these applications. They can cost-effectively do so with the Microsoft government cloud because it is an open cloud. The Microsoft cloud supports a range of industry-leading operating systems, languages, tools, and frameworks—from Windows to Linux, SQL Server to Oracle, and C# to Java. And with Windows and Linux ecosystems available to them, developers can build innovative government applications and services that work from a variety of devices.

These are just a few of the ways in which the Microsoft government cloud can help governments operate more efficiently during a time of shrinking budgets. To learn more about how the cloud can provide a safer, more agile, and cost-effective way to operate, please visit our Microsoft in Government website.

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Imagine a world where everything from roads to bridges to airplanes are maintained just in advance of them breaking down. A world in which sensors alert public safety agencies of safety hazards before they erupt into disasters. And a future when mobile devices serve up requests for information to citizens within seconds of them posing a question.

Such scenarios are no longer confined to the realm of Star Trek. Thanks to innovations from Microsoft and others, they are very close to reality. And the result will be a far more transparent and responsive government that makes public information easily accessible, while protecting the safety of its citizens.

As the Internet of Things takes hold, governments will equip their communities with numerous sensors to monitor safety, traffic, and other information. They can then tap into this data using the Microsoft Azure Stream Analytics
service in the cloud, which streams millions of such events per second and uncovers real-time insights from these sensors along with data from mobile devices, infrastructure, and applications. In processing these events, Stream Analytics compares multiple real-time streams of information with historical values and models to detect anomalies. Any specific error or condition that appears in the stream triggers an alert, so government officials can make corrections very quickly.

By equipping roads, bridges, vehicles, and planes with sensors, government agencies will be able to predict with precise certainty when specific parts are about to fail and then fix them before they break down. They’ll also be alerted to conditions such as rising carbon dioxide levels and contaminated water in residences, to help avert safety hazards.

In addition to operating more safely, governments will increase their responsiveness by putting big data analytics in the hands of employees and citizens. No longer will big data be solely the domain of computer experts. With Microsoft Azure Data Lake governments can combine an abundance of data in a single repository and then make it available to employees and citizens for mining. Just as a lake stores a lot of water, Data Lake enables vast amounts of original data of any size and format to be securely loaded and streamed into the lake without prior schema definition or data transformation.

With all that data stored in a single repository, employees with the right credentials will be able to use Microsoft Cortana Analytics to transform it into valuable insights that improve their efficiency. Likewise, citizens will be able to mine large repositories of public data to obtain information very quickly. Using their Cortana personal assistant along with Windows speech recognition, employees and citizens will be able to use their voices to ask their devices questions, tapping into the repositories of data to extract the exact information needed, which Cortana delivers up via speech or text.

The implications of this technology are enormous. Think of government jurisdictions struggling to collect unpaid traffic fines. When a citizen walks into a state Department of Motor Vehicles to renew his driver’s license, employees using Cortana will be able to tap into numerous databases around the country and then require the driver to pay any outstanding fines before obtaining his license.
Likewise, imagine a citizen who wants to know when the next public transportation is arriving and whether it would be faster to take light rail or the bus. By posing a question to Cortana on her mobile phone, she can quickly obtain an answer, so she can reach her destination in the shortest amount of time.

The Internet of Things, natural language recognition, and big data analytics are poised to transform the way government works, helping it to improve safety as well as operate far more effectively than in the past. To learn more, please watch our video on machine intelligence and advanced data analytics.

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