The human resources people at Microsoft were somewhat taken aback when the city of Carlsbad, Calif., started grilling them on what types of background checks Microsoft performs on its own employees.
But Gordon Peterson, director of IT for the seaside city just north of San Diego, says that before he would allow municipal e-mails to live in Microsoft's cloud he wanted assurances that the background checks Microsoft conducts on its people were as thorough as the checks Carlsbad conducts on its IT workers.
"Security was a big part of the RFP," Peterson says. "We asked a lot of questions on how you do security, on their hire-fire process." For example, Peterson wanted to know what security procedures Microsoft takes when it terminates an employee.
"I don't know that they'd ever been asked that before," says Peterson. But Microsoft answered the queries to Carlsbad's satisfaction and the city recently signed on for Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite, a cloud-based service in which Microsoft hosts the city's e-mail and collaboration services, including SharePoint, Live Meeting and instant messaging.
Peterson readily admits that "not everybody is perfectly comfortable" with the idea that municipal e-mails are being hosted outside the walls of the city. But he weighed the pros and cons and worked through a variety of issues with Microsoft before coming to the conclusion that "the hosted environment has a higher degree of security than we can provide internally." For example, Peterson says that within his 20-person shop, tasks are shared, so he's not able to achieve the separation of duties that a larger security organization can put into place.
The road to the cloud
Carlsbad is a city of about 100,000 people with a municipal employee base of around 1,000, according to Peterson. The city has been working for the past couple of years to consolidate the number of IT platforms and once it chose Microsoft as a strategic partner, that meant moving from Groupwise to Exchange for e-mail.
The next question for Peterson was whether to build and maintain the system internally, build the system and have someone else run it, or have it fully hosted.
Peterson had conversations with Gartner analysts, conducted a thorough RFP process and ultimately decided that a hosted solution was the way to go.
"We felt comfortable that this is viable. We learned that it's less expensive than doing it ourselves," Peterson says. He adds that going with hosted e-mail frees up IT staffers to do more high-value projects. "Around 70% of our time and money is spent keeping the lights on," Peterson says. "The rest is innovation and that's where the real value comes in."
In pure dollars and cents, over a four-year period, the Microsoft deal will cost $330,000, a managed solution would have cost $390,000 and doing it all in-house was a $500,000 proposition, according to Peterson. "That's a 30% or more savings to not do it ourselves."
In term of implementation, Carlsbad went live with Exchange in late March and everything went smoothly from Microsoft's end of things. "You went home Friday as a Groupwise user and you came back Monday as an Exchange user. The service works fine," he says.
The only glitch occurred when it came to data migration. Carlsbad used a third party to migrate existing data from one system to the other, and initially about 100 of the 1,000 end users didn't get their files moved. That was quickly rectified.
One of Peterson's initial concerns had to do with bandwidth. Carlsbad has a 20MB pipe to the Internet and Peterson says he was worried that it wouldn't be enough, especially when bandwidth usage soared to near 100% on the first Monday morning of the Exchange rollout. But Peterson said after that initial spike, which he attributed to employees signing on for the first time all at once, bandwidth usage has returned to previous levels.
For Peterson, the Microsoft cloud service is both a hosted e-mail service and
Post new comment