Satya Nadella introduces Azure Government Cloud General Availability

photo (7)Today, AIS participated in the Microsoft One Government Cloud event and Expo introducing the General Availability (GA) of Azure Government Cloud at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC.  Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, participated in a fireside chat and shared his vision for the industry and discussed how government organizations can thrive in the mobile-first, cloud-first world.

Microsoft’s key message:
In a mobile-first, cloud-first world, Microsoft’s One Government Cloud is the most complete cloud platform designed for U.S. Federal, State, and Local Government. With tools like Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Azure, and Dynamics CRM Online, discover how the Microsoft Cloud for Government provides cost savings, rigorous security and compliance, and hybrid capability with an integrated open platform—all from one trusted source. Become familiar with the Microsoft Cloud for Government and you’ll be prepared to move towards the future today.

AIS demonstrated the following Azure Government applications in the Azure Government Expo:

The AIS “TIPS” application combines crowd sourcing video, images and text from the public over smart phones, with Azure Government for scale and geo-redundant locations, with a big data/Hadoop hive and HDInsight for analytics. Initially developed as a POC for the FBI following the Boston Bombing, the AIS TIPS system can be applied to support any public sector law enforcement agency to automate the collection of TIPs for a single event or in general. All input is embedded with location and time stamps to enable the digital orchestration of investigation over time and location.

The AIS “Mobile H&HS Surveyor/Investigator” solution automates the scheduling, management and operations of federally mandated surveys and investigations of health care facilities performed by all state governments. Health and Human Service (H&HS) licensed facilities which provides treatment under Medicare and Medicaid must be surveyed and renewed annually and meet strict reporting and investigation service level agreements. All necessary CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid) Forms are automated on tablets with touch/stylus/voice interface for ease of use with a subset of functions supported on phones. The mobile workforce is scheduled and managed by a central Microsoft Azure-based system.

AIS has been involved in the Azure Government Cloud since the beginning. Our previous commitments, projects and deployed workloads in pubic Azure positioned AIS well to be among the first Microsoft partners invited to participate in the Azure Government preview.

From our perspective, Microsoft Azure offers the most complete, comprehensive solution for cloud services today. Microsoft was already the leader in SaaS with their market leading O365 platform that includes CRM Online and SharePoint Online. In addition, Microsoft has very quickly reached a high degree of feature parity with the most advanced IAAS public cloud offerings. Their hybrid on-prem to IAAS integration truly sets them apart against all other vendors. While IaaS offers a great degree of efficiency and cost avoidance, there isn’t much that’s transformative about hosting virtual workload in a public cloud versus hosting on your own platforms. It’s the 300 plus Azure PaaS services that Microsoft offers that allow firms like AIS to envision and deliver truly transformative solutions.

With Microsoft Azure Government and Azure PaaS, AIS can now build solutions that were not possible before. PaaS is our transformational toolbox. Azure Government is the most mature, fully featured cloud solution in the marketplace. The timing is perfect as Governments are faced with reduced budgets and the need to transform the services they offer for a digitally enabled public.

For more information please visit:

AIS Azure Government Cloud
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/trust-center/compliance/
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/features/gov/