Chicago Picks Microsoft Cloud For Email

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Eric Lundquist.

Six months ago, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked CIO Brett Goldstein to bring the Windy City into the digital age. The most visible example of Goldstein’s digital sprint came in the first week of January with an announcement that the city was shifting its 30,000 employees to cloud-based email and desktop applications based on the Microsoft 365 office cloud.

Cloud computing, which often seems too much hype and too little reality, is starting to capture real customers. And government organizations, cities in particular, are paying attention and starting to sign up for cloud services. Chicago, a city not known for being trendy for trend’s sake, is the latest to make a big cloud commitment…

Chicago officials said they are migrating the city’s 30,000 civil servants from their current email and desktop applications to Microsoft 365. The win is important for Microsoft, which is locked in competition with Google and Amazon over signing customers into their cloud-based environments. The decision to use a cloud service and the selection of Microsoft started last June and culminated in the January announcement. The selection process "took much longer than I would have liked," said Goldstein, who started in his position last June following a career that included stints both with the Chicago police department and in private industry as the director of IT at OpenTable Inc…

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