Kudos to the city of Carlsbad, California. They were getting ready to enter into a contract that would consolidate several of their IT platforms into Microsoft’s Cloud technology. Before doing so, they were wise enough to ask what type of background checks Microsoft conducted on their employees and what their hiring standards were when they found adverse information. See excerpt from the article we found on The Industry Standard.
“Security was a big part of the RFP,” Peterson [Gordon Peterson, Director of IT for the city of Carlsbad] says. “We asked a lot of questions on how you do security, on their hire-fire process.” For example, Peterson wanted to know what security procedures Microsoft takes when it terminates an employee.
“I don’t know that they’d ever been asked that before,” says Peterson. But Microsoft answered the queries to Carlsbad’s satisfaction and the city recently signed on for Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite, a cloud-based service in which Microsoft hosts the city’s e-mail and collaboration services, including SharePoint, Live Meeting and instant messaging.
In the end, the city was satisfied with Microsoft’s practices and decided to move forward. I know the story might have been more sensational if they found significant issues, but what I’m excited about is the due diligence the city performed ahead of time to protect itself. While this can’t guarantee that issues won’t arise, at least the city know that it did everything possible to make an informed hiring decision.
Great job Mr. Peterson!
