News release: “NOAA announced an $11.5 million, three-year award to Earth Resources Technologies, Inc. for cloud-based unified messaging services. The agency-wide transition will modernize e-mail and calendar infrastructure, integrate collaborative tools and facilitate synchronization with mobile devices to better support NOAA’s mission and its nationwide workforce. As the largest federal agency to adopt cloud technology to date, NOAA will migrate 25,000 mailboxes to the cloud rather than utilizing in-house servers. NOAA’s decision to pursue the cloud solution supports the Obama administration’s direction to pursue a “cloud first” approach. “The cost to the taxpayer will be 50 percent less than an in-house solution,” said NOAA Chief Information Officer Joseph Klimavicz. “As the new standard, cloud computing has great value allowing us to ramp up quickly, avoid redundancy and provide new services and capabilities to large groups of customers.”