Microsoft's Office 365 For Government Heralds New Google Fight

Nerval's Lobster writes "In a bid to expand the reach of its cloud services, Microsoft has introduced Office 365 for Government, which features the same cloud-based productivity tools as Office 365 but stores data in a segregated community cloud. Google and Microsoft have been locked in vicious battle over the past few years to score cloud contracts for government agencies. Microsoft hopes its support of standards such as ISO 27001, SAS70 Type II, HIPAA, FERPA, and FISMA will help to give it an edge in winning those contracts."

Re:At least it won't happen here

[tlhIngan]

I am in the UK and anything based in the USA, or controlled by US companies is by default insecure.

Sorry guys but anything your spooks think they can get away with fooling around with is not suitable for anything remotely confidential. That won't stop some crook who happens to work stealing it, as happened in NZ but we have to at least try.

And that is before we get into your commercial 'confidentiality' practices...

Perhaps you guys might consider offshoring your secure storage to somewhere with some decent Information Governance regulations.

Actually, that's why Microsoft created the private cloud version of Office365 (the "for Government" part). Right now, if any country chooses it, there's no guarantee where data is stored. It was one egg-in-face moment when Microsoft announced that Google doesn't guarantee your data is stored locally, then realized the same applied to it.

This is an attempt to rectify that - letting and ensuring that data is stored where you want it to be stored.

It's a big problem because yes, any data stored on a US machine is subject ot US laws, where even Canadian companies dealing with the Harper Government have to ensure that the data doesn't leave Canadian soil (yes, storing on a US server counts).

It's one of those more obvious errors about the cloud and government that you'd think the cloud providers would've thought of...

Re:I'm hoping for microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, office 2011 and win 7? Pretty tricky to run office 2011 on win 7...