USDA migrates to the cloud

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced plans to move 120,000 users to online cloud services and email.

The move is one of the largest cloud migrations by a government agency yet. "Migrating an enterprise of USDA's size and complexity from multiple environments, across multiple agencies, requires not only a trusted enterprise-ready solution, but also a partner that is able to work with us and navigate everything from archiving to authentication to mobile phone support," said Chris Smith, chief information officer at USDA.

The USDA awarded a contract to consolidate 21 email systems to cloud services in May and has since worked with the cloud provider to ensure the system’s security measures adhere to the Federal Information Security Management Act’s definitions.

According to Jill Aitoro of the Washington Business Journal, the services will be hosted on dedicated clouds powered by data centers in the U.S.

The USDA is one of several government agencies to employ cloud computing. Its announcement comes shortly after the General Services Administration made public its plans to move its 17,000 employees to the cloud for email and applications services.