British Columbia government’s ongoing effort to adopt the public cloud took another step forward last week in order to better respond to the COVID-19 crisis, taking a corporate approach to help public sector bodies meet the needs of their clients and citizens.

On April 2, 2020, the Office of the Chief Information Officer signed an amended Microsoft Business and Service agreement that removes the previous restrictions related to the use of personal information in hyper-scale cloud services.

This agreement is in the wake of the changes that were made in October 2019 to the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIPPA). As a reminder, Bill 35 received royal assent, allowing for out-of-Canada execution of microservices to facilitate the use of temporary processing and storage of information outside of Canada through the use of cloud-based services.

This new step forward means that public organizations that use this agreement can now benefit from the following Microsoft’s solutions: Office 365, Dynamics, Azure and Power BI.

This agreement is part of OCIO’s work to facilitate the adoption of cloud services and aims at accelerating BC public sector’s digital transformation by allowing them to use modern tools and processes to do their best work.

In addition to this, the OCIO has signed a Ministerial Order last March to help public sector organizations to access tools to support public health and emergency response under the condition that these tools are reasonable secure and that the personal information is removed from these tools as soon as this period is over.

The government of British Columbia has made a lot of changes over the past few years to facilitate the adoption of cloud services and has identified Microsoft Cloud Services in Canada as an ideal provider for modernization, greater agility, enhanced information security, and privacy as well as cost and complexity reduction.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Softlanding offers Microsoft-funded Azure/Office 365 Assessments for BC public sector customers to help you understand your cloud readiness level and help you develop a case for migration, determine if your applications are ready for the cloud as well as provide a budget and timeline.

Contact us now to see if your organization may be eligible for a Microsoft-funded assessment.

Written By:

Caroline Blivet

As Softlanding's Marketing Lead, Caroline and is responsible for driving lead generation, developing a go-to-market strategy and, delivering marketing campaigns. Outside of work, Caroline enjoys hiking the beautiful trails of British Columbia.

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