You know that your organization needs to digitally transform and take advantage of the speed, scale, and economics of cloud services to empower your agency to advance its mission—so you can innovate and increase efficiency in ways never before possible. But for most defense organizations moving to the cloud has to be a gradual process. You don’t want to put everything in the cloud. And for the digital services you do put in the cloud, you want to make sure you still have control over your data and you have the right security and transparency.

The good news is that the cloud doesn’t have to be an all or nothing proposition. You can take advantage of it on your own terms with our hybrid cloud solutions that enable the flexibility and security you require.

In other words, you don’t have to choose between your datacenter and the cloud. You can get the best of both worlds when you combine an onsite datacenter with a cloud solution designed specifically for your needs. And you can streamline application development, security, and administration across on-premises, private, and public cloud environments.

To help you prioritize which workloads to move to the cloud—and when and how to move them—look at what you require to support your mission priorities. Perhaps some initiatives call for cross-agency collaboration, others high-powered computing and systems of intelligence, and others fast application development, adaptation, and scalability—while some demand all of the above and more. Then, determine the sensitivity of the data involved. Based on the data classification, you can designate where data needs to reside and what kinds of safeguards and data governance must be in place.

You can then choose from our private, hybrid, or public cloud environments to locate the different services per their security classification, anticipated demand, sensitivity, and other requirements. You can even designate that certain services be in a datacenter in your region.

For example, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) in the United Kingdom found the right balance between enabling employees with anytime, anywhere data access while ensuring security. It adopted the Microsoft Cloud, as well as Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection and Customer Lockbox from a Microsoft U.K. data center.

Learn more about how our complete, trusted cloud can offer the choice and control you need to digitally transform your way and advance your defense organization’s mission. Visit our defense cloud digital transformation site.

The post Take advantage of the cloud on your terms appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Consider a circle of trust in the intelligence community. It’s critical that intelligence officials within a circle of trust quickly obtain access to relevant information so they can communicate and collaborate in real time. But team members may have different security classifications, requiring that different levels of information be shared with different people.

Public safety organizations face similar challenges. For example, courts typically keep juvenile criminal records confidential to prevent the juvenile from being labeled a criminal. Yet school officials, child protective workers, attorneys, researchers, and others who work with juveniles must be able to obtain access to these cases on a need-to-know basis.

Managing information in scenarios such as these can be complex. But the good news is that technologies such as Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft SharePoint make it easy for public safety and national security agencies to collaborate—while preventing information from falling into the wrong hands. Consider the following capabilities:

Multi-factor authentication

Office 365 and SharePoint prevent unauthorized user access to files by requiring at least two pieces of evidence for users to log in. To be granted sign-in access, users typically must acknowledge a phone call, text message, or app notification on their smartphone after correctly entering their password.

Role-based user access

Office 365 and SharePoint enable organizations to grant different levels of permission to information based on different roles within the organization.

Data loss prevention

Data loss prevention features help organizations identify, monitor, and automatically protect sensitive information across Office 365.

Message encryption

Office 365 comes with an easy-to-use service that lets email users send encrypted messages to people inside or outside their organization.

Information Rights Management

Information Rights Management helps prevent sensitive information from being printed, forwarded, saved, edited, or copied by unauthorized people.

Audit trails

Administrators can review records to see what actions were performed by users—including workers who attempt to access information without the proper authority.

Mobile device management

Office 365 lets administrators manage mobile devices by setting device access rules, viewing device reports, and remotely wiping devices that are lost or stolen.

With features such as these, public safety and national security organizations can effectively perform their jobs without the fear of information being leaked. Simply put, they can easily control sensitive information, while ensuring that the right stakeholders have the information they need to make effective decisions based on real-time information.

One national security agency that’s migrating to Office 365 to improve information sharing is the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence (MOD). MOD is moving its 420,000-employee workforce to Office 365 as part of a larger effort to embrace user-friendly technologies that exploit the cloud and mobile computing. As Mike Stone, Chief Digital and Information Officer at the Ministry of Defence, put it: “At the MOD, we have a clear mission to deliver the modern, open, and flexible IT resources required to ensure our forces have information capabilities tailored to their mission, location, and role, accessible through a cost-effective and adaptable infrastructure. Microsoft’s plans to offer highly secure, UK-based cloud services is an exciting development and one that will clearly support the MOD in our transformation journey.”

To learn more about how Microsoft enable public safety and national security agencies to collaborate securely, please see our Office 365 Security and Compliance white paper. Also, look to request a trial: Azure Government Trial, Office 365 Government Trial.

The post Secure collaboration for public safety and national security agencies appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Last year, when the Internal Revenue Service began enabling taxpayers to download their tax transcripts, 17 million people took advantage of the service, reducing phone, email, and in-person requests by 40 percent. The new IRS service is a great example of the kinds of government initiatives that can improve citizen services while reducing costs. Yet such services are only possible with a secure and affordable identity management system.

Just a decade ago, identity management was relatively simple. Governments managed their own servers on-premises, supplying employees with a user name and password to access desktop computers. However, in the current mobile-first, cloud-first world, managing user identities has become increasingly complex. Today, identity management often involves monitoring access to a combination of on-premises and cloud-based applications and services. It frequently requires managing the identity of a proliferating number of devices that users bring to work. And, increasingly, it entails overseeing a broad network of citizens and other external users—such as the citizen logon accounts required for the IRS tax transcript service.

The importance of user identity only continues to grow as governments seek to control not just the complex mix of users and devices, but also an exploding number of sensors used to monitor government operations.

Through all of these changes, Microsoft continues to set the standard for identity management. Windows Server Active Directory is currently used by 95 percent of Fortune 1000 companies on-premises, while 1.4 million businesses, government agencies, schools, and nonprofits in nearly 130 countries use Azure Active Directory to authenticate users in the cloud, on-premises, or both. And to ensure that our customers have the most advanced identity management tools, we’re continuing to innovate at a rapid pace.

So what are some of the identity management features we provide? Here are six capabilities that are helping governments secure access to their information:

• Hybrid identity: Hybrid identity provides an in-depth way for governments to manage user access to applications and other resources from a variety of devices across their datacenter and the cloud. User identity can be managed in a unified way regardless of whether applications are stored on-premises or in the cloud. Moreover, managers can easily set up accounts for new employees and quickly remove them when an employee leaves the agency.
• Self-service and single sign-on: Microsoft makes it possible for employees to change and reset their own passwords. They can also create a single sign-on for accessing all of their applications and resources using the same credentials.
• Multi-factor authentication: Microsoft provides the ability to incorporate multiple layers of protection through multi-factor authentication, which requires users to identify themselves in more than one way—for instance, by what they know, such as a user password, and by what they have, such as swiping a smartcard.
• Biometric authentication: Microsoft also makes it possible for users to identify themselves by what they are, through fingerprinting, facial recognition, and retina and iris patterns. With Windows Hello, for example, Windows 10 users can gain access to their devices by showing their face or touching their finger. Using authentication based on a person’s unique biological characteristics, governments have a simple and safe way to protect the security of their information.
• Security reporting and monitoring: Finally, Microsoft offers advanced monitoring and reporting to help governments monitor suspicious logon activity, obtain alerts, and mitigate potential security issues. And with Active Directory Assessment Intelligence Pack, governments can use logic, machine learning, and organizational data to assess the risks and health of their Active Directory environments, while obtaining suggestions for remediating any issues that are found.

Until recently, identity management was one of the biggest barriers to government online services. With the advanced tools offered by Microsoft, those barriers are a thing of the past. Governments can take advantage of today’s secure and affordable identity management tools to offer more citizen services while keeping their information protected.

To learn more, please see Microsoft’s Identity + Access webpage.

The post Helping governments manage user identity appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

This trove of data presents tremendous opportunities for those prepared to use it. The question is, how can governments perform meaningful analysis and produce actionable information from this data in a way that will benefit citizens? Much of the effort in IoT today has focused on managing the end devices that produce data. But the Internet of Things is not about the sensors; it’s about the data the sensors produce.

Link analysis already is already helping us understand the relations between a person of interest and other people, places, and things. Police Departments already use Geographic Information Systems to identify high-crime areas and put “cops on the dots.” But what if we could correlate historical weather data with crime statistics and sentiment analysis to predict when and where certain kinds of activity can be expected? Smart meters can track household energy usage; what if this data could be used to identify vacant homes that are at risk for vandalism and arson? Traffic light data already is used to understand traffic patterns; what if this data could be combined with public event calendars and social media to anticipate traffic problems on a given day, time, and location?

The big challenges of using Big Data effectively are visibility and scale. First, making the data visible so that it can be used requires knowing what data is being generated, who owns it and where it resides, and what format it is in. Beginning with this, data scientists can normalize data and do the correlation and analysis to provide relationships for users. But gaining visibility is not necessarily a simple task – data resides not only in separate systems and silos, but is controlled by different political and administrative entities. Data on energy usage belongs to utilities, which can be either public or private, and traffic information belongs to the traffic department. Both of these could be useful to police, but police departments will have to cross administrative boundaries to access it.

Second, the sheer scale of the data involved can be daunting. Sensors can produce millions samples per second, demanding huge storage capacity. Storage demands can be compounded by the need to maintain historical data. Real-time or near-real-time analysis can be valuable, but value grows as historical data is used to identify and project trends.

To take advantage of the opportunities offered by the IoT to improve citizen services, agencies will have to have the storage and computing capacity to manage Big Data from multiple sources and produce actionable analysis. There are three important steps in enabling your city, department or agency to do this:

• Understand what data is available and what you want to do with it. This will include data from your own sensors and systems, but can also include that from other departments and organizations. It also can include open source data that can be culled from social networks that can provide information on public sentiment and activities.
• Develop a scalable platform for storage and analysis. Not all of the data you are using will be under your stewardship, and it is unlikely to be in one place. This requires not only storage capacity, but also a system to access and correlate data from disparate sources and in different formats. Cloud services can be a good choice for setting up this platform, providing the scalability, flexibility and economy to take advantage of data in innovative ways.
• Determine what you are providing to citizens in exchange for access to the data. The ultimate goal should be to provide value to citizens, and this is all the more important when you are using citizen managed data, such as that from smart metering and social media. There is a cultural and generational shift occurring in which “digital natives” are increasingly comfortable with sharing information, but willingness to share ultimately will depend on the value proposition being offered.

When everything is connected, it means that everything-no matter how insignificant-will become a source of data. Seemingly unrelated information ranging from temperatures and traffic lights to energy usage and generation of garbage could reveal previously unseen relationships that can drive improved citizen services and better public safety. As governments work toward better understanding, utilizing, and exploring these data resources, they move toward a more connected and protected society.

The post The Internet of Things: It’s all about the data appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

There’s no question that the Internet of Things (IoT) is here to stay. As more sensors are added to everything from vehicles to buildings to street lights, the number of “connected things” in use is expected to hit nearly 5 billion by the end of this year, according to the analyst firm Gartner. And by 2020, that number will escalate to 25 billion.

The ability to collect information from sensors holds tremendous promise for governments of all sizes. By equipping their assets with sensors and connecting these sensors to the cloud, governments can tap into continuous information streams that help them increase efficiency and reduce costs, make better-informed decisions, and improve citizen services in ways never before imagined. In a nutshell, they can create smarter, safer, and more sustainable cities.

When you’re analyzing information nonstop, the volume of information allows you to predict behaviors. And that’s the ability that IoT provides. By understanding the behavior of people and things on a very detailed level, governments can repair vehicles, bridges, roads, and other types of infrastructure before they break down. They can better understand traffic patterns to improve transportation flows. And they can conserve valuable resources such as water and energy. Consider a few examples:

• Predictive maintenance: ThyssenKrupp Elevator, one of the world’s leading elevator manufacturers, connected its elevators to the cloud, gathering data from sensors and systems to better understand when and why its elevators break down. By analyzing information ranging from motor temperature to cab speed to door functioning, the company can now repair its elevators before they break down, dramatically increasing their reliability.
• Improved transportation: Autolib’, an electric-car-sharing program established by the city of Paris and 63 surrounding municipalities, wanted to ease traffic congestion and provide more flexible transportation options for 8 million people who live in the region. By connecting hundreds of handheld devices, more than 4,300 charging stations, 850 registration kiosks, and 2,300 cars, Autolib’ is gaining insights that allow it to predict customer behavior and optimize car utilization. At the same time, it is personalizing the driving experience by presetting the driver’s preferred temperature and radio stations before he or she climbs into the car.
• Resource management: The Monterey Regional Water Pollution Control Agency, which manages a wastewater treatment plant in California, is working to optimize the distribution of reclaimed water to farmers and everyday users in a way that reduces electricity use. To do that, the agency is outfitting its facilities with connected sensors and transforming the data into insights that help it to move its water supply in a way that meets user demand while using less energy.

As these examples illustrate, IoT can transform government in powerful ways. To help our customers more easily deploy IoT solutions, we recently launched the Azure IoT Suite, a cloud-based offering with preconfigured solutions that enable organizations to capture and analyze untapped data. By launching this suite, our goal is to help our customers thrive in this new era of IoT by delivering open, scalable platforms and services that governments of all sizes can use to create new value, right now.

The new era of IoT is here. And as governments embrace it, they will transform their communities into truly smart cities that enrich citizen lives.

To learn more, please watch our short video summarizing the Microsoft vision for IoT.

The post Creating smarter cities with IoT appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

As law enforcement officials gear up for the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Annual Conference and Exposition this weekend, they are focusing on how they can use technology to make their communities safer. One area in which technology can help is big data analytics. With today’s advanced tools, law enforcement agencies can fight crime far more proactively than ever before. And they can solve the crimes that do occur with greater success.

One of the best ways to keep communities safe is to prevent crimes from happening in the first place. Yet, until recently, this proved a difficult challenge for law enforcement agencies. The good news is that leading-edge technology now exists to help agencies identify crime patterns on a very detailed level—and it can do so in a highly secure and scalable way. For example, Microsoft Azure Data Lake enables law enforcement agencies to store any type of data including text, images, and video of different formats in a single repository—no matter how much they have. With all of their data stored in a single place, police officers can then use Microsoft Cortana Analytics to analyze this information using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. And they can easily tap into this information using their Cortana personal digital assistant and Windows speech recognition, asking questions of their computers and mobile devices to extract the exact information they need.

Law enforcement agencies are starting to use tools such as these to predict, anticipate, and prevent crime. For example, one police department we’re working with is using Microsoft technology to aggregate and analyze public safety data streams in real time. The police department is analyzing data from live camera feeds, 911 calls, police reports, and other sources to help it proactively fight terrorism and reduce other types of crime.

Advanced analytics can also be used to identify criminal patterns ranging from burglaries to murders to domestic violence. For example, it can help law enforcement agencies to sift through vast amounts of information, automatically identifying the habits of a repeat burglar, including means of entry, the time of the break-ins, the type of properties targeted, and the geographical distance from other burglaries. It can also be used to assess burglaries on a larger scale, helping police officers to identify patterns as to when and where break-ins are likely to occur, so they can prevent future burglaries from happening.

With detailed information about crime patterns, law enforcement agencies can put more police officers on the street during high-risk situations. If they know, for example, that burglaries are likely to take place in condominiums located on through-streets in specific neighborhoods during summer months between 10 A.M. and 3 P.M., they can add more police officers in those places at those times. They can also work with other government agencies to reduce the risk of break-ins, for instance, by offering summer youth programs in specific neighborhoods during the hours when burglaries are most likely to happen.

Advanced analytics also offers the opportunity to respond more effectively to crimes once they occur. Think about the 2013 Boston Marathon terrorist attack. After the bombings, police used social media outlets to collect a vast amount of citizen data. And although sifting through this data required a huge effort, it eventually helped them to track down the suspects. In the future, police departments will have the opportunity to use advanced analytical tools to pull out the most important leads, helping them to solve crimes very quickly.

With everything from store security cameras to past police reports to evidence from bystanders’ cell phones, today’s law enforcement officials have an overwhelming amount of information that can help them solve crimes. The trick is to quickly make sense of this data—which is the magic that advanced data analytics provides.

If you’re planning to attend IACP, please be sure to stop by Microsoft Booth #5211 where we’ll be showcasing some of these technologies. Also, please see our recent blog post, “Proactive Approaches to Policing.”

The post Fighting crime with big data analytics appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

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.

The post Efficient government operations appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

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.

The post The future of government appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.