Microsoft has been steadily making moves to bring its office productivity and other software to the cloud. As Datamation reports, the latest announcement is aimed at federal and public-sector agencies.
Microsoft announced Wednesday that it is releasing a version of its hosted online services for business optimized for government IT organizations.
The new Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) for Federal is Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) latest offering for public-sector agencies, company officials told 300 CIOs gathered at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash., for its eighth annual U.S. Public Sector CIO Summit.
“The new Business Productivity Online Suite Federal is optimized to meet the security, privacy and compliance needs of U.S. federal government agencies,” the company said in a statement.
Ron Markezich, corporate vice president of Microsoft Online, also announced “future capabilities and certifications” coming to BPOS Federal over the next six months. That includes “two-factor authentication, enhanced encryption and the expected attainment of Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification,” according to the statement
Microsoft claims to be the only cloud computing vendor to provide such capabilities.