Our goal in hosting this gathering is to help Canadian government and healthcare leaders better serve citizens and patients by:

• Achieving a balance between cloud-based digital transformation and the need to maintain trust, security, privacy and compliance.
• Accelerating sustainable, smart-city technologies that enhance quality of life.
• Addressing the cybersecurity threat at all levels of government to protect national security and sensitive, personally identifiable data.

Balancing cloud adoption and citizen trust

Microsoft wants to empower Canada to take advantage of digital and cloud technologies to help their citizens, the private sector and government functions achieve more while remaining compliant with provincial and federal laws. Our Microsoft Azure cloud platform leads the industry with more certifications than any other cloud provider. Our cloud datacenter in Canada is part of Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure of 100-plus datacenters, serving more than 140 countries with one of the most connected networks in the world. We recognize that British Columbia has specific privacy regulations that require us to do even more than other provinces or countries. As a result, we’ve developed a trusted data collaborative model that helps the government create a strategy for securely sharing data between municipalities, government functions, the private sector and beyond its borders. Microsoft also has launched a roadmap called A Cloud for Global Good to help policymakers adopt laws to ensure a trusted, responsible and inclusive cloud that benefits all.

Smart-city technologies

Microsoft has invested significant intellectual capital into helping create smart, sustainable cities. Our CityNext initiative is all about empowering cities across Canada and around the world to accelerate innovation, reduce costs, increase efficiency, and drive smart and sustainable, digital-city solutions. Our secure, Azure platform enables these smart-city solutions, leading to educated, healthier, safer and sustainable communities that embrace digital innovations. We believe this is an especially timely topic given the Trudeau administration’s recent launch of the Smart City Challenge, as reported in IT World Canada.

Cybersecurity

Microsoft is working to protect government agencies from new cyber threats. We are dedicated to providing secure, trusted cloud solutions, and complete customer transparency to thwart cybersecurity breaches. I believe we have the best collection of cybersecurity experts in the industry. Our Digital Crimes Unit and the Cyber Defense Operations Center work in close partnership with the Canadian government and international law enforcement agencies to analyze, detect and protect against cybersecurity threats across public and private sectors.

We encourage you to learn how governments and health service providers are harnessing the cloud to deliver secure, digital solutions by taking advantage of these free resources:

For Government:

• Please download our Empowering Digital Transformation e-book
• Visit our Digital Transformation for Government website.

For Healthcare:

• Please download our Building Rigor into Cybersecurity: A Blueprint for Healthcare Organizations e-book
• Visit our Cloud Security for your Healthcare Organization website.

The post Bringing digital transformation to British Columbia appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

This new era is ushering in a whole new phase of digital government transformation that involves embracing technology on a much deeper level to accomplish a broad range of advanced goals. Digital government transformation is about creating a single point of entry for citizens to access government services anytime, anyplace, from any device. It’s about using the power of social media to proactively understand the needs and concerns of citizens and make predictions about how to sustainably evolve government and keep pace with rapid urbanization and new work and lifestyles. It’s about citizens measuring the success of government services and outcomes to deliver those services where they are most needed. And it’s about leveraging advanced analytics across agencies to gain new insights that help governments maximize their performance using open government data. In a nutshell, digital government can help make governments accessible, efficient, and transparent in ways never before possible.

Cloud computing, mobile technologies and this most recent revolution are driving this digital shift, fostering opportunities for governments to work with citizens and other agencies in a highly flexible and cost-effective manner. Yet for this shift to take place on a large scale, governments must embrace the innovation that comes from partnering with those outside the walls of government including citizens, community organizations, academic leaders, and businesses in new ways.

A great example is the City of Barcelona and the Catalan Government, which are working with the City Protocol Society and technology thought leaders from around the globe across industry and academia to create smart cities that help governments govern together with citizens while stimulating local small business.  Barcelona hopes to set forth a whole new era of economic growth that leverages open government data and the Internet of Things while creating public and private partnerships that share the procurement cost with the private sector.

In New York City, the New York Police Department (NYPD) created a new revenue sharing partnership with Microsoft to extend the value of its ‘Domain Awareness System’ solution to other jurisdictions. Developed jointly by the NYPD and Microsoft, the solution helps police investigators detect potential criminal activity by aggregating and analyzing information from thousands of cameras, license plate readers, sensors, and law enforcement databases into a simplified dashboard that helps police officers first responders, and investigators gain better situational awareness with a 360-degree view of what’s going on around them. And the news is spreading. Citizen service and law enforcement agencies from all over the globe are inquiring about how they, too, can create new business models like this inside their cities.

As governments seek to genuinely transform how they deliver services for the digital era, we believe that the need to transform the way governments procure and implement new innovations are as important as the innovations themselves for long-term sustained improvement. Governments, civil society, and the private sector should all be accountable for the long-term sustainable results in the same way that corporations create shareholder dividends. Every public sector digital success should result in a measurable social and economic dividend and not exacerbate the digital divide that already exists.

Interested in learning more? Look to request a trial: Azure Government Trial, Office 365 Government Trial.

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For emerging and developing countries around the world, data security and privacy is an urgent question that affects both national security and economic growth. The ability of governments to grow their economies is directly related to their ability to build public value through trusted and transparent citizen services like voter registration, tax processing, licensing and permitting. But while governments understand that cloud innovation can provide a quantum leap in delivering those services cheaply and at scale to leverage the compute and storage capacity they need, they are also wrestling with the very real concerns about how to protect sensitive citizen data.

In my recent travels, it has become increasingly clear that governments are seeking thought leadership about data governance and classification now more ever. Should they build private datacenters? Should they store data locally? How should they trust the cloud and what guarantees can their cloud provider offer?

For government agencies, the stakes are particularly high and, in many of the debates happening around the world, the emotions about data security and privacy are drowning out the rational conversations about best practices for legislation and policy.

In an especially salient example, the Irish Warrant case recently in front of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will decide whether a domestic search warrant can compel Microsoft to produce data stored in servers outside the United States. Governments around the world are watching this case as a test of public cloud viability and will look to the verdict as a potential lesson for how they should treat their data both within and without their borders. Governments need hard and fast plans they can act on today to ensure that their data are never compromised, even as precedent-setting laws are being written.

By taking a stand on these issues, Microsoft is in a unique position that comes with unique responsibilities for setting a high bar for cloud security, privacy, transparency, and compliance. We believe fundamentally that however a government chooses to leverage the cloud should remain on their terms.

When governments partner with Microsoft to solve their data security and privacy issues, they create the means to provide assurance about how specifically their data are managed in the cloud:

1. Microsoft cloud services are designed, developed, and operated to help ensure that government data is secure
2. Governments are always in control of their data to maintain the highest standards of data privacy.
3. Governments should always know how their data are treated in the cloud and experience a high degree of transparency when another government has made a request for their data.
4. Governments can meet and anticipate their compliance obligations by achieving important cloud security and privacy standards, such as ISO 27018.

In fact, many governments are finding that the Microsoft public cloud might be more secure than what they can create and maintain on their own. Because we have invested significantly in our global hyper-scale cloud infrastructure, Microsoft can provide governments the cloud environment that is best for them—public, private or hybrid—and help them to anticipate data governance issues in a way that ensures they are implementing the safest and most comprehensive data security plans.

The post How should governments trust the cloud? appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Building smart cities on a large scale requires both innovation and collaboration. And one organization that’s working to bring about a shared approach is City Protocol Society. A member-based nonprofit, City Protocol is bringing together cities, academia, and industry from around the globe to create an organizing framework for building more efficient, high-quality cities of the future. And to make that happen, it is developing protocols that will help modern cities implement cross-sectorial solutions that break down city silos and connect cities with each other.

In late June, I had the pleasure of participating in a virtual workshop hosted by City Protocol Society. The workshop, “City Transformation: From Practice to Protocol,” is part of a six-week Summer Global Workshop series that explores city foundations and transformation. Already, many cities are developing best practices or “protocols” that can be replicated by other cities. And several examples were discussed during our two-hour workshop, including one that I shared about Cape Town, South Africa.

South Africa’s second most populous city, Cape Town, is working to become a united, efficient, and inclusive city in which everyone has the opportunity to pursue their dreams. To help bring this about, the city is moving its infrastructure to a private cloud so that it can deliver the same services in an equitable manner to all citizens.

Among the challenges Cape Town faces is severe traffic congestion. The city’s poorer residents, many of whom live in the city’s outlying areas, often spend hours getting to work using various public transportation options. The city’s more affluent residents drive their cars on highly congested roads. Visitors have difficulty finding their way around the city, which negatively affects businesses that rely on tourism. And the city’s minibus taxis don’t adhere to fixed routes or schedules.

To address traffic congestion and encourage public transportation use, Cape Town has begun to offer FindMyWay, a Windows 8 app developed by a local startup that helps citizens optimize their movements around the city. To encourage use of the app by residents who cannot afford smartphones, a text-based option is available for use with simple “feature” phones. Data gathered from the public’s use of the app is stored in the Microsoft Azure cloud so that city planners and entrepreneurs can analyze it and use this information to design future transportation improvements.

By offering FindMyWay, Cape Town is helping residents move around the city faster, which, in turn, is improving the economic health of the city. As Andre Stelzner, Cape Town’s Director of Information Systems and Technology, puts it, “Helping poorer people find more affordable opportunities to get to work is good for the economy. Making it easier for tourists to enjoy our beautiful city will boost tourism. And as we learn from people’s movement patterns from the app, we gain valuable information to ensure our future investments in public transportation match how people prefer to move around the city.”

FindMyWay is a great example of the solutions that cities can develop when governments, citizens, and the private sector work together. It also illustrates the types of innovations that can be replicated across cities to solve common problems.

To hear all five city transformation projects that were shared during the workshop, you can listen to the entire presentation here. The Summer Global Workshop series continues through the end of July, so please be sure to sign up for an upcoming focus session.

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