USDA Services Moving To the Microsoft Cloud 146
JoltinJoe77 writes "Not to be outdone by Google, who recently announced an e-mail deal with the GSA, Microsoft is pressing forward with a migration of its own. 'The US Department of Agriculture is ready to go live with Microsoft's cloud services. In the next four weeks, the agency will move 120,000 users to Microsoft Online services, including e-mail, Web conferencing, document collaboration, and instant messaging.'"
Re:Purely money motivated (Score:2, Informative)
You would be completely wrong in that regard, as the sub-agency that I work for (which is, indeed, shifting from Domino to Exchange along with the rest of the department) settled on the MS BPOS services after looking at the problem from a lot of different angles. Inasmuch as a public university often does have pseudo-governmental oversight in the form of their state legislature's laws, your experiences at your university do not in any way bear a resemblance to what the Dept of Ag is attempting to do. There is a pretty draconian SLA in place that will certainly bode ill for MS if their five 9's doesn't appear in practice.
Plus, there are *much* bigger issues at stake, such as legal requirements to capture and retain all email traffic for a given window of time. MS is agreeing to provide this service as a feature of their offering rather than forcing us to develop a massive internal data warehouse of all mail traffic that keeps everything for five years or more. (No, seriously. That's some of the crap we have to deal with.)
Probably the biggest selling point is that it is incredibly difficult... practically impossible... to fundamentally restructure a government agency along a whole new software platform. Don't just think about the email servers and clients. Think about the budget lines, the personnel teams, the fact that we don't have any internal SMEs for this new platform. Adding new FTEs to the government right now is nearly impossible. I've heard that USDA took a billion-dollar cut for the 11-12 fiscal cycle, which means adding expensive new teams is a non-starter. Plus, should we try to internalize these efforts, we'd have to go through the on-boarding of many contractors and the effort of standing up servers & SAN infrastructure at NITC. You have no idea how expensive it is to contract colo for servers at a GSA facility. The numbers of the MS contract are big, but the cost of doing it internally would probably be twice as much over the same period with poorer service.
It is true that many folks in the trenches have reservations, but no-one is arguing that we should continue to lumber along with Notes and Domino. In fact, there have been a small percentage of the staff who have requested that they be allowed to use Outlook, based upon the fact that Notes is a horribly byzantine email client.
So to sum up: Your cynicism is somewhat misplaced. And comparing your university of 10K students against our situation isn't very apropos, as just my agency is over four times as big as your entire university.
Re:FTA: "separate, secure facility" (Score:2, Informative)
I work for the USDA's Farm Service Agency in their database office and I can tell you that the program data that is collected is NOT part of this deal. There are no plans that I know of to move our databases off of our current SAN and to one managed by Microsoft. From TFA, it appears that this is limited to email and communication services, not database storage.
Re:Why does the USDA have 120,000 employees? (Score:2, Informative)
USDA does a wide variety of stuff related to agriculture. For example, at the agency I work for, our job is to keep invasive pest & disease species out of the US..