On April 17, Microsoft announced a milestone in serving its mission customers from cloud to edge with the initial availability of two new Azure Government Secret regions, now in private preview and pending accreditation. Azure Government Secret delivers comprehensive and mission enabling cloud services to US Federal Civilian, Department of Defense (DoD), Intelligence Community (IC), and US government partners working within Secret enclaves.
In addition, the company has expanded
the scope of all Azure Government regions to enable DoD Impact Level 5 (IL5)
data, providing a cost-effective option for L5 workloads with a broad range of
available services. With a focus on innovating to meet the needs of our
mission-critical customers, Microsoft continues to provide more PaaS features
and services to the DoD at IL5 than any other cloud provider, the company said.
Azure Government Secret delivers comprehensive and mission enabling cloud services built with additional controls to support US agencies and partners with workloads classified by the US government at the Secret level. In addition, Microsoft is continuing its commitment to deliver government workloads across the full range of data classifications.
“Azure Government
Secret will enable us to take applications in legacy IT environments and move
them onto a scalable, high-performance platform. This will be a great
opportunity to modernize services, making them more efficient and effective for
our defense customers,” said Keith Johnson, chief technology officer for the Defense and
Intelligence Groups, Leidos
Based on mission owner feedback and evolving security capabilities, Microsoft has partnered with the DoD to expand the IL5 Provisional Authorization (PA) granted by the DoD to all Azure Government regions. This expanded coverage provides customers with more PaaS features and services at IL5 than any other cloud provider, Microsoft said.
This expanded range of PaaS services means mission owners can leverage managed services to be more productive. For example, development teams can use Azure App Service to quickly create cloud apps using a fully managed platform, or Azure SQL Database for a fully managed relational cloud database service that provides the broadest SQL Server engine compatibility.
Source: Microsoft
By Loren Blinde
April 19, 2019
