Microsoft runs a separate version of Microsoft 365 for the public sector. It is called GCC, for Government Community Cloud, and it exists because a county clerk, a police department, or a utility holds information that the commercial cloud was never designed to hold. Counties, cities, courts, clerks, sheriffs, utilities, housing authorities, school districts, and special districts qualify. So, in some cases, do the contractors who handle their data. Microsoft decides eligibility, the check takes days to a few weeks, and we handle the paperwork.
What changes is where your data lives and who can touch it. GCC data stays in data centers in the United States run for government customers, the Microsoft staff with access are screened United States persons, and the service is built to the federal FedRAMP standard and to the FBI's CJIS security policy, which is the rule that matters the moment criminal justice information is involved. The apps are the ones your people already know: Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Word, Excel. The difference is behind them.
Two things to plan around. New features reach GCC later than the commercial version, sometimes by months, so a feature announced on the news is not a feature you have that week. And a government tenant is its own tenant: an organization already running the commercial version does not flip a switch, it moves, mailbox by mailbox and file by file, which is a project we scope and quote before it starts.
Florida adds a rule of its own. Public records law reaches email and Teams chat, and the retention and legal hold tools that answer a records request exist in GCC but do nothing until someone sets them. We set them on the first day, with the records custodian in the room.
Not every public body needs GCC. The usual trigger is CJIS: if your people see criminal justice information, the question is settled. Many towns, utilities, and districts run well on the commercial version with the right settings, and we will say so when that is true. Government work is one of the nine kinds of business we know best, and the people who run it are on the team page, by name.
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