Efficient government operations with Microsoft
Today, governments at all levels are being pulled from opposite directions. On one end, citizens are demanding greater responsiveness and more government services. On the other, they are compelled to work within budgets that continue to shrink.
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.
