The City of San José is moving to the cloud, making a step to catch up to its own residents, in the capitol of Silicon Valley. The city will move to Microsoft’s hybrid cloud solution Windows Azure, StorSimple, and Office 365 for business processing. San José joins Santa Clara County and the City and County of San Francisco on the list of government customers in the area that have chosen to move to the cloud with Microsoft.
The City’s transition to Microsoft’s enterprise cloud platform will begin this summer, and implementation throughout the organization is expected to take approximately six months.
The city is the latest in a growing trend at the state and local government level to implement cloud solutions in order to upgrade services on an on-demand basis. The mandate for “cloud first” is being driven at the federal level. According to a recent IDC report, federal cloud spending is set to reach $1.7 billion in FY2014 and $7.7 billion by FY2017.
San José will get a number of new services with the upgrade including the ability to have remote participation, videoconferencing, improvements in data visualization, disaster recovery and a major reduction in total costs for more than 70 TB of data the city maintains.
“The combination of these services supports both our long-term technology strategy and the immediate needs of our employees and residents,” said Vijay Sammeta, San Jose chief information officer.
