US federal agency moves emails to the cloud

The US government agency for products and communications, General Services Administration (GSA), has moved 17,000 employee email accounts to Google Apps for Government, announced Martha Johnson, GSA Administrator. This US$6.7 million migration, tasked to Unisys, means that employees can access their emails anywhere and on any device compared to when the agency was using IBM’s Lotus Notes and employees needed to log on to the agency network to read emails, share documents and chat. Enhanced user authentication, like two-factor authentication, and other security improvements were also added during the transition phase. Johnson said that using a cloud-based system will reduce email operation costs by 50 per cent over the next five years, thus saving GSA more than US$15.2 million within the same time frame. “A large part of these savings will come from a decrease in the number of costly data centers requiring hardware, software licenses, maintenance, and contractor support,” Johnson explained. This cloud migration is one of the 78 systems the US government has identified as suitable for the cloud earlier this year.
The move, along with its successes and challenges, will help better inform GSA’s decision making and allow them to better serve their customer agencies as they begin moving to the cloud, said Johnson. “With GSA’s contracting knowledge, cloud email experience and customer-focused expertise, we will help other agencies transition to the cloud — moving our government forward and saving taxpayer dollars,” Johnson said. “Already, 15 agencies have identified 950,000 e-mail boxes across 100 email systems that are going to move to the cloud.”

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