City of Carlsbad connects to the cloud

The human resources people at Microsoft were somewhat taken aback when the city of Carlsbad, Calif., started grilling them on what types of background checks Microsoft performs on its own employees.

But Gordon Peterson, director of IT for the seaside city just north of San Diego, says that before he would allow municipal e-mails to live in Microsoft's cloud he wanted assurances that the background checks Microsoft conducts on its people were as thorough as the checks Carlsbad conducts on its IT workers.

"Security was a big part of the RFP," Peterson says. "We asked a lot of questions on how you do security, on their hire-fire process." For example, Peterson wanted to know what security procedures Microsoft takes when it terminates an employee.

"I don't know that they'd ever been asked that before," says Peterson. But Microsoft answered the queries to Carlsbad's satisfaction and the city recently signed on for Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite, a cloud-based service in which Microsoft hosts the city's e-mail and collaboration services, including SharePoint, Live Meeting and instant messaging.

Peterson readily admits that "not everybody is perfectly comfortable" with the idea that municipal e-mails are being hosted outside the walls of the city. But he weighed the pros and cons and worked through a variety of issues with Microsoft before coming to the conclusion that "the hosted environment has a higher degree of security than we can provide internally." For example, Peterson says that within his 20-person shop, tasks are shared, so he's not able to achieve the separation of duties that a larger security organization can put into place.

The road to the cloud
Carlsbad is a city of about 100,000 people with a municipal employee base of around 1,000, according to Peterson. The city has been working for the past couple of years to consolidate the number of IT platforms and once it chose Microsoft as a strategic partner, that meant moving from Groupwise to Exchange for e-mail.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine