The Veterans Affairs Department has awarded HP Enterprise Services a $36 million contract to move 600,000 email accounts to the cloud.
Under the five-year contract, VA users will have access to email and shared calendars using Microsoft Office 365 for Government. Users, however, will not have access to additional features such as instant messaging and web and video conferencing.
“VA is moving to cloud-based email and collaboration as part of a broader effort to leverage emerging technologies to reduce costs, increase efficiencies and, most importantly, improve service delivery to our nation’s veterans,” Charles De Sanno, executive director for enterprise systems engineering at the VA, said in a news release.
The HP contract was awarded under VA’s Veterans Administration Transformation Twenty-One Total Technology, or T4 program.
The administration’s cloud first mandate requires agencies to first consider a cloud solution when procuring information technology. In addition to VA, Agriculture Department, Federal Aviation Administration, Defense Information Systems Agency and the Environmental Protection Agency are using Microsoft’s cloud-based email.
