Hemant Pathak, Assistant General Counsel at Microsoft
As with most cloud services Office 365 is provided as a subscription rather than at an upfront cost. There are multiple business-related benefits associated with this model, not the least of which is potential cost savings. An Office 365 e-mail subscription starts at $4.00 per user, per month, which represents a significantly lower outlay than buying licenses for all the functionality it provides. Importantly, the monthly cost of Office 365 includes all updates, including security patches, ensuring that all users are on the most up-to-date version of the various components at all times.
It is not just the upfront cost of software that Office 365 alleviates. By having this software hosted in the cloud, organizations are not required to house expensive servers, and the staff necessary to maintain them. This enables smaller organizations, which cannot justify the outlay for on-premise solutions, to enjoy enterprise-level features without the associate cost or administration overhead.
Furthermore, Microsoft provides 24x7 Office 365 support, so organizations need not have support staff on-site to assist users as they encounter problems with the software.
Another important feature of Office 365 is its 99.9% Service Level Agreement which ensures that the vast majority of users are unlikely to ever notice downtime. Whereas organizations with on-premise solutions would have to schedule downtime to apply updates or be unable to work if there was an unexpected outage, Microsoft accounts for all these concerns behind the scenes.
Additionally, Microsoft takes responsibility for the security and integrity of the data it stores for users. The scale at which Microsoft operates enables it to take far greater pains in this area than many Benefit Plans could, ensuring that even a catastrophic hardware failure won't affect the integrity of your data.
Microsoft is also one of the few vendors of cloud services that have put forth a Business Associates Agreement between them and their healthcare customers. The agreement is in compliance with the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the final omnibus HIPAA rule, effective March 26, 2013. HIPAA has reformed modern healthcare, allowing for administrative simplification and improved privacy and security of patient records. Dennis Schmuland, chief health strategy officer, U.S. Health & Life Sciences at Microsoft boasts that “Microsoft Office 365 is the only major cloud business productivity solution to programmatically offer a BAA built with the industry, and for the industry, to HIPAA-regulated customers, allowing healthcare organizations to be confident in the security and privacy of their patient data while empowering their staff to communicate and collaborate virtually anytime and almost anywhere.”
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To learn more about Microsoft's Office 365 Cloud services click here.
SOURCE Microsoft Corp.
Contact Frank Zurek at frank.zurek@lpartnersinc.com for further information on Office 365 and other cloud services tailored for multi-employer benefit funds.
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