Because IT is critical but not an area of expertise for the company, CenterPoint Properties decided to transition its IT environment to the public cloud, starting with Microsoft Office 365 for email and office applications, Microsoft OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Azure. Scott Zimmerman, Chief Information Officer for CenterPoint Properties, explained, “Given the size of our company, having redundant data centers for our systems that require high availability didn’t make much economic sense for us. As such, we are leveraging the cloud, which has built-in geo-redundancy for the same price as hosting a single instance in our data center.”