Microsoft is expanding the availability of its secure Azure Government Cloud Secret service for handling classified data
First announced at the Government Cloud Forum in Washington, D.C. on October 17th, 2017, the service is designed to give the U.S. government, including federal civilian, the U.S. military, defense agencies and the intelligence community access to secret-level Azure Government Cloud.
Microsoft is already having six government-only data center regions with DoD Impact Level 5 Provisional Authorization, including two regions for DoD workloads only.
There are two levels of classifications. Microsoft has been authorized for "secret data" (not top-secret). And this Microsoft 'Secret' is technically its own to comply the government classification, but not a provisional authority level.
"Customers with Secret requirements can expect to gain access to new technologies at scale, including services such as cognitive capabilities, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics," said Microsoft officials said in a blog post.
This also provides both infrastructure (IaaS) and platform (PaaS) offerings to enable digital transformation.
Azure Government Cloud is the locked-down version of Azure designed especially for U.S. government customers, in December 2014. Codenamed "Fairfax," this cloud service is meant for federal, state, local, tribal, and DoD customers and their resellers/solution providers.
This Azure Government Cloud data centers are secured and operated and supported by U.S. citizens with background screening. All customer data, content, organizational data, hardware, networking, physical infrastructure, and supporting personnel are also inside the U.S..
In addition to that, Microsoft is also launching Citrix VDI on Azure Government to help its government customers deliver user workloads from the cloud.
With Citrix VDI on Azure Government, customers can extend existing Citrix environments and deploy Windows 10 desktops into Azure Government from Citrix Cloud.
There is also Blockchain for Azure Government. According to Microsoft, blockchain technologies deployed on Azure are applicable to complex problems facing government today, including distribution of funds after natural disasters, registration of property ownership, and other issues involving tracking ownership of funds or assets through multiple transactions.
For security, Microsoft announced a ynified security management with Azure Security Center. And for speed, Microsoft is extending its existing public sector HPC offerings, including the NC-series and Azure Batch, to include the H-series virtual machines.