With serious cyber security measures in tow, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture becomes first major federal agency to embrace cloud computing.
More than 120,000 U.S. government employees are moving to the cloud thanks to the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) decision to abandon its in-house e-mail, calendar and communication servers in Exchange (pun intended) for external services provided by Microsoft.
With the move, the USDA becomes the first cabinet-level government agency to embrace off-site, third-party server storage, otherwise known as cloud computing. The department will use Microsoft’s Exchange Online services for calendar management, messaging, document collaboration, Web conferencing and more to help link its 120,000+ employees across 5,000 different offices in more than 100 countries. The USDA previously employed more than 20 different messaging and collaboration systems among its workers.
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Besides greater efficiency and feature availability, the move to the cloud is expected to provide the government with a significant cost savings. The USDA’s transition to off-site servers is part of a government-wide plan to shut down at least 800 of its 2,000 in-house data centers by 2015. That is expected to shave $20 billion off the federal government’s $80 billion annual IT budget for server maintenance. The USDA was chosen to move to the cloud first because its in-house servers were already due for upgrades and repair.
Moving an entire agency’s-worth of sensitive government information off-site is not without its cybersecurity pitfalls, and security measures surrounding the move are intense. To win the USDA’s cloud business, Microsoft agreed to create separate, secure facilities and infrastructure specifically for the USDA and future government customers. Physical access to USDA-dedicated servers will be limited by biometric access to a small number of authorized individuals. By government mandate, all those who can access and maintain the USDA servers must be U.S. citizens who have undergone rigorous background checks. To close the deal, Microsoft also had to complete its certification under the Federal Information Management Security Act of 2002. Google also holds the government’s official authorization to operate cloud-based services on behalf of federal customers and the military.
With the money saved by outsourcing its servers, the USDA plans to increase deployment of mobile computing devices for its field agents. The agency already owns several hundred iPads and provides many field employees with iPhones to help access USDA systems and resources while interacting with the public.
The USDAs move to the cloud will happen slowly, with about 10,000 employees per month making the switch.
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