Office 365 is a subscription service that provides online access to Microsoft Office and the company’s other cloud services. Microsoft describes the cloud as “a friendly way of describing Web-based computing services that are hosted outside of your organization. When you use cloud-based services, your IT infrastructure resides off your property (off-premises), and is maintained by a third party (hosted), instead of residing on a server at your home or business (on-premises) that you maintain.” “They saved on resources, management and maintenance, and saved on hardware and equipment [too]. The result is ecofriendly because nothing is hosted at the university anymore, because it’s hosted elsewhere,” Microsoft Public Sector and Education account manager Roula Chehab told The Daily Star. “It contributes to cost savings in terms of infrastructure and so on … you simplify access to technology through a service where you get all the productivity suites … without any interruption, and without relying on anyone [else, because] it’s on Microsoft’s cloud services,” Chehab said. “It’s always guaranteed to be up and running and it doesn’t need any maintenance.” The company says that with Office 365, “information storage, computation, and software are located and managed remotely on servers owned by Microsoft.” USEK is a large educational institution with campuses across Lebanon. Its large numbers of servers, previously housed on premises, required continuous IT maintenance and security measures, and consumed a lot of power. The move to Microsoft Office 365 comes as part of USEK’s 15-year plan to become a more environmentally friendly institution. As of March 2015, the university’s 400 back-office staff and 1,000 lecturers are now using Microsoft Office 365, according to a document obtained by The Daily Star. “The initial phase of the scheme resulted in it becoming the first higher education establishment in Lebanon to move its 12,000 students, 2,000 of whom are based remotely, from an on-premises version of Microsoft Office to the Office 365 online system at the end of 2012,” it read. By moving to Office 365, USEK has cut down from 350 dedicated servers in 2008, to 10 virtualized ones today. It will also allow students to better communicate and collaborate with professors, which they can now do remotely through its OneNote note-taking application, OneDrive cloud-based storage system and Microsoft Lync unified communications system. The Daily Star