Microsoft has just teamed up with the corporation Capita to offer them the Office 365 service according to the Channel. The deal will see Microsoft host all employee emails and some 20,000 staff will be migrated over to Microsoft’s cloud service. Apparently Microsoft’s service is more cost-effective and Microsoft has pledged to host entirely within the EU and that it will obey all data protection obligations within the EU.
Despite Microsoft pledging to host in the EU, so data is subject to European laws, Capita has still decided to host and secure its most sensitive data itself because it is naturally still dubious about Microsoft’s cooperation with the NSA and the PRISM program that saw the NSA using American companies in foreign nations to harvest data.
Microsoft’s Office 365 service was developed so that they could take Google on more strongly in the business and enterprise sector in response to losing a lot of accounts to Google. Despite early start-up problems the service now shows 99.7% up-time and even though it cannot compete with Google on price it is still doing reasonably well.
You can read more details on Microsoft’s Office 365 capita deal here, they also have a lot more information about Microsoft 365 and their competition with Google’s services if you’re interested in that kind of thing.
Image courtesy of Nethope.org
