Your smaller city can provide responsive citizen services with the cloud
Whatever your size, you can become a smart city and keep up with citizen needs and expectations with the cloud.
Microsoft Industry Blogs: Government
Explore:
5 takeaways from the 2026 Microsoft Digital Sovereignty Summit
Digital sovereignty has rapidly moved from a policy debate to a strategic business priority. As nations recognize that cloud, data, and AI are quickly becoming the backbone of economic competitiveness and national security, the focus has shifted toward managing risk, ensuring control, and building resilience in an increasingly volatile environment.
Section 508 (ICT Refresh) Chapters
The full text of the standards is available from the US Access Board, and visit Section508.gov for more information. The following chapters are extracted from the U.S. Access Board ICT Refresh, reprinted here for ease of direct linking to referenced standards as they relate to conformance statements.
Azure-powered CitySourced delivers government right to your mobile device
Microsoft partner CitySourced is simplifying and expanding civic engagement through a new mobile platform as a service.
Migration must-have: open-source integration
Integrating with open source is a need for many organizations who are migrating to the cloud.
Does your provider offer hybrid flexibility?
In some cases, you will want the capability of integrating on-premises solutions with the cloud.
Find a provider with a record for addressing security
Cybersecurity threats continue to evolve, and a cloud security provider who understands the threat landscape, has a history of protecting against them, and proven experience responding to them can give you more confidence in the security of your data.
Don’t overlook document retention and e-discovery
Meeting and enabling legal compliance means cloud service providers should be able to manage and store data in a way that meets government data retention, e-discovery, public records obligations, legal holds, archiving, messaging rules, and more – as part of the core service, not by requiring to the purchase of expensive third-party add-on services.
Does your data reside exclusively with other screened workloads?
When storing sensitive data, it’s imperative to know what other data and workloads are being stored in the same cloud infrastructure. Government cloud service providers should apply rigorous screening policies and procedures to determine eligibility for all incoming requests.
IRS 1075 guidance and ITAR obligations
IRS tax security guidelines and International Traffic in Arms (ITAR) regulations have special data storage, confidentiality, data location, and other substantive requirements that rely on specific security features.
CJIS: Make sure your provider would pass an FBI audit
Critical in the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) standards are employee background checks, detailed security updates and the ability for the State CJIS Systems Agency (CSA) to examine and inspect cloud solution providers to meet their audit requirements.
Compliance: non-negotiable
Requirements around compliance are complex and nuanced: from HIPAA to the IRS to the Department of Defense (DoD) and FedRAMP, cloud service providers should prove they not only understand compliance standards—but can help you meet them. Only government regulators can determine when an agency or organization is in compliance.
Microsoft announces new capabilities in Office 365 for the US Government Community; helps enable communication, enhanced security, and data analytics
Microsoft’s Office 365 team announced advanced capabilities that provide enhanced voice and meeting communication, advanced analytics, and increased security for users of Office 365 Government.