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Microsoft Azure for Government is Generally Available

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Microsoft has announced the general availability of Azure Government, the cloud platform designed exclusively for public sector and federal agencies.

Announced at the Microsoft Federal Executive Forum in March 2014, Microsoft Azure Government is now generally available. Over hundred government customers and solution providers tested and evaluated the platform so far.

According to Tom Keane, Partner Director, Program Management, Microsoft Azure, the platform has the following capabilities:

  • Isolation – Microsoft Azure Government’s infrastructure, including the datacenter, hardware, network and software, are isolated to at the physical, logical level to meet the unique compliance standards.
  • Community – Azure Government is restricted to a set of government agencies and their solution providers, including federal, state, local, tribal and the Department of Defense.
  • Security – Data centers are secured using physical, logical and procedural controls. Important controls include secured access control to the datacenter, second person screened escorts, aisle cameras, and secured cabling. All security controls are audited and logged.
  • Screened personnel – Operations and support are performed by personnel who are United States persons, who have been background screened. These personnel are based in redundant Service Operating Centers (SOCs), which are greater than 500 miles apart.
  • Continental United States – All customer data, content, and organizational data (both at rest and in transit); all hardware, networking and other physical infrastructure; and all personnel reside in the Continental United States (CONUS).
  • Business continuity - Datacenters are physically isolated from other cloud services and geographically distributed more than 500 miles apart. This enables geo-replication and integrity between locations that supports business continuity and disaster recovery.
  • East Coast region – Azure Government has an East Coast region in order to be in close proximity to customers and to, provide efficient high speed connections to Washington D.C. and surrounding areas.

Azure Government includes most of the Azure services, including IaaS, PaaS, Storage, VNETs, Azure Active Directory and SQL DB. Azure Active Directory, the directory service in the cloud offers a physical and logically isolated namespace partition for the public sector users.

More details of Azure Government can be found at http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/features/gov/

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