crédit Michael Hicks
L’état du Minnesota aux États-Unis a annoncé lundi qu’elle avait signé une entente historique avec Microsoft. Microsoft va fournir des services en impartition pour le courriel, des sites web, le calendrier collaboratif, entre autres. On parle ici de l’offre Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) qui est similaire à celle de Google Apps.
Voici une analyse par Don Macvittie de cette entente dont on connaît peu de détails :
In essence, this takes “private cloud” to a different place than I would have envisioned. They’re outsourcing. Yes, there’s a line in the sand, beyond which the state has complete control, but they have essentially given Microsoft their infrastructure (the collaboration and email piece of it anyway) and are holding Microsoft accountable for security and software maintenance. That’s a pretty solid plan if the admins at the state can manage the applications as they need/desire. There are gray areas that would need to be covered, like what types of threats are user/application threats that Microsoft isn’t responsible for, what’s the escalation path, etc. But those are no doubt covered in the contract, which we don’t have access to.
Microsoft is giving over dedicated space (notice that the article does not say dedicated hardware anywhere in it), and even has committed a datacenter that the cloud will run out of. The price tag must have been pretty high, but Microsoft Exchange admin, IM (ala Microsoft Communicator) admin, and Microsoft Sharepoint admin – the hardware and software maintenance, routing, upgrades, etc part – is expensive too. The state knows what that portion of its budget will cost and can focus on running the apps that the state and its citizens require to get the job done.
via Minnesota and Private Cloud sur Cloud Computing Journal.
