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."

At least it won't happen here

[Gonoff]

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.

Re:I'm hoping for microsoft

[The MAZZTer]

As a consultant who works on projects for govt, I hate Office 2007 and it's "collaboration" features which are pretty much non-existant. I would love to use Google Docs but we cannot due to the proprietary nature of our work. I'm pretty sure there's an Enterprise edition of Docs that can run more locally but I work for a Big Company (TM) so getting such software is probably impossible. I'm just waiting for Office 2011, which I THINK they're rolling out on the new Win 7 machines. Still running XP personally.

Re:I'm hoping for microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it interesting that the parent said almost exactly the same thing you did, but chose MS's side rather than Google's. He got downvoted, you got upvoted.

I hate MS more than most around here, but this censorship by the trol^w mods needs to end.