India’s Tata Steel is taking its first steps into the cloud by migrating two legacy email systems onto a Europe-wide deployment of Microsoft Office 365.

Tata Steel, the second biggest steel producer in Europe following its 2007 acquisition of Anglo-Dutch giant Corus, accepted a joint bid from Microsoft and Capgemini, which will provide systems integration and migration services.

"We found the joint Microsoft and Capgemini proposal convincing both technically and commercially and we look forward to gaining the many benefits of the new solution with speed," said Shreekant Mokashi, Tata Steel’s chief of information services, in a statement.

The company will adopt a range of hosted services from Mircosoft, including its Exchange Online email server, its Lync Online unified communications platform and the latest versions of Outlook and Exchange Online Archiving.

"This move to an enterprise-ready cloud communications platform will significantly improve our ability to respond rapidly to the challenges and opportunities of today’s marketplace," said Mokashi. "It will also be a significant contributor to our plans to reduce our overall IT operating costs."

Microsoft said that Tata Steel’s deployment will be "one of the first large-scale enterprise implementations of Office 365 in Europe".