City of Carlsbad, California

Project: Communication & Collaboration Services

The City of Carlsbad, California has 1,100 employees across 22 departments who work in 30 different facilities across the city. Until recently, the City’s employees used a 15 year-old, non-standard IT system. The City’s IT department knew it had to simultaneously standardize its IT infrastructure and cut costs without sacrificing its high level of service. When the City began the process of standardizing its IT infrastructure, officials decided to review options for migrating from an on-premise e-mail and collaboration system to one hosted in the cloud.

The City ended up selecting a cloud-based version of the Microsoft productivity suite, hosted in Microsoft’s data centers outside of Carlsbad. It was able to eliminate the costs of maintaining equipment, paying only monthly user fees for this new environment. While the City considered using an on-premises version of the productivity suite instead due to data security concerns, it realized that from a disaster recovery standpoint, their data was more secure being hosted outside of the City’s data center.

The City has already realized a 25 percent savings over the past year using the new off-site solution, as there is no longer a need to maintain servers, manage upgrades, implement hardware replacements, or hire a systems administrator. The City realized other immediate benefits after the migration, including better access to e-mail from mobile devices and new, integrated instant messaging and web collaboration for meetings and video conferences.