City of Pittsburgh inks $4 million deal with Google to migrate to the cloud - Android

Google says the deal will allow the city to reimagine how to serve citizens.

What you need to know

• The city of Pittsburgh has signed a four-year deal with Google to migrate its IT infrastructure to the cloud.
• Pittsburgh currently uses on-premise data centers, which are neither scalable nor flexible.
• In addition to reducing its IT costs, the deal will also allow the city to provide new digital services for residents.

In what comes as a big boost for Google cloud, the city of Pittsburgh has announced a four-year deal with the search giant to migrate its IT infrastructure to the cloud. Currently, the city uses on-premise data centers that provide "a fairly brittle environment that isn't scalable or flexible."

Heidi Norman, acting director of the City of Pittsburgh Department of Innovation & Performance told ZDNet:

We decided to take a leap with Google and do something that is, within municipal governments, innovative.

Along with scaling its existing services, the migration to the cloud will also enable the city's 19 departments to create new applications for residents in areas like transportation, infrastructure, public, safety, and more.

The deal comes five months after West Virginia signed an agreement with Google to move its employees to Google Workspace. Google also won a contract with the city of Memphis in 2019 to use AI and machine learning for pothole repairs.

While Google Cloud has been seeing decent growth over the last few quarters, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure still remain the best cloud storage services for businesses, developers, and government agencies. As per data from Canalys, AWS held 32% of the global cloud infrastructure market in Q4 2020, while Microsoft Azure's stood at 20% during the same period. Google Cloud could only increase its market share to 7% from 6% a year earlier.