The State Department wanted to make tens of thousands of foreign affairs-related historical documents, publications and data sets more accessible to the public, and 50 databases more available to its employees worldwide.
It did so on the cloud, a move intended to reduce the need for maintaining data on costly, energy-inefficient agency-owned servers. The decision also fit the Office of Management and Budget's cloud-first policy, which requires every department and independent agency to move three information technology projects to the cloud, the first by December, the other two by June.