While CES 2019 was at the top of every techie's mind last week, Microsoft also managed to score a big payday from the U.S. government. The Redmond tech giant was awarded a $1.76 billion contract from the Department of Defense (DoD) (via GeekWire) to provide Microsoft Enterprise Services for a period of five years.
According to the announcement, the contract sees Microsoft providing services for the Coast Guard and intelligence community, in addition to the DoD.
Support includes Microsoft product engineering services for software developers and product teams to leverage a range of proprietary resources and source-code, and Microsoft premier support for tools, knowledge database, problem resolution assistance, and custom changes to Microsoft source-code when applicable.
In addition to the DoD contract, Microsoft this week announced that its Outlook mobile app for iOS and Android now meets security and compliance standards for Office 365 Government Community Cloud (GCC) High and DoD customers. The designation means that all U.S. government customers can now use Outlook mobile, Microsoft says. From Microsoft:
To meet the high level of government security and compliance requirements, we updated the Outlook mobile architecture to use a native Microsoft sync technology. This change intends to reduce latency and will provide access to new enterprise-grade features such as S/MIME as they roll out on the updated architecture over the coming months.
