Case Study: Montgomery County achieves lower costs and streamlined service delivery with Office 365

County Chooses Office 365 over Google to Lower Costs, Enhances Service Delivery

Montgomery County, a large Pennsylvania government organization supporting more than 3,000 employees and 4,000 email accounts across 60 locations, faced an aging messaging infrastructure prone to outages, poor mobile interoperability, and growing archival and security needs. With budget constraints and a choice between rebuilding on-premises or moving to the cloud, the county evaluated Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365—business users favored Office 365 three-to-one, and several agencies cited security and U.S.-based data storage as decisive factors.

The county adopted Office 365 E2 (Exchange Online with archiving and litigation hold), then rolled out Skype for Business and Yammer with help from a Microsoft partner. The move eliminated costly hardware and third-party archiving (avoiding up to ~$1M in infrastructure and a $500K archiving expense), freed IT staff time (about 30% savings), delivered 99.9% availability, sped responses to public-record requests from weeks to seconds, enabled secure mobile access and encryption for HIPAA compliance, and streamlined service delivery across agencies.

Montgomery County

Josh Shapiro

Chairman of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners