Microsoft yesterday took a giant leap towards fulfilling its mission of giving back to society, and acknowledged through philanthropy the growing importance of cloud computing in the modern age.
The Redmond-based company made an announcement yesterday to donate $1 Billion worth of ‘cloud computing services’ to university researchers, and non-profit organizations. These services, billing into multiple digits, would be doled out to these universities, and over 70,000 such organizations over the span of next three years.
Microsoft’s Hyderabad-born CEO, Satya Nadela, who was at the heart of this decision said that he believes that cloud computing has become a vital resource for addressing the world’s problems that many of these institutions and non-profit organizations are trying to fix, and as such this is the best way to help them in their cause.
In an online post Satya Nadela elaborated on the reasons behind this decision. He said,
” Last fall, world leaders at the United Nations adopted 17 sustainable development goals to tackle some of the toughest global problems by 2030, including poverty, hunger, health and education.
A careful read of those goals reveals the central role that data and cloud computing must play for analysis and action.”
This particular project will be a part of a greater three-part Microsoft donation program.In what will be welcome news to the various organizations who will be helped by it, yesterday’s announcement will see the company expand its global donation program to include its full suite of cloud services.
The particular suite will include Microsoft Azure, allowing nonprofit organizations to use Microsoft’s vast data centers for their apps and Enterprise Mobility Suite that will enable the organizations to manage all their devices/apps/data on a cross-platform basis.
