Microsoft Launches Private Preview Of The Azure Government Cloud

At Microsoft’s Federal Executive Forum, an annual event where people from around the federal government gather together to discuss how technology can be used to improve their workflow and others. As we are seeing in the other industries, Cloud computing is a hot topic among Federal agencies too. The popular public cloud services from Amazon, Salesforce, etc, does not suit their needs.

As agencies explore moves to the cloud, many may have solutions already in place, and they need a partner who can help them leverage those, lower security risks and reduce training and implementation costs. In some cases, agencies may often be looking at some new combination of private cloud or even public or dedicated community cloud for government. Our hybrid cloud gives complex government environments the flexibility of working with us on their terms and within their architecture choice. Instead of coming to the table with predisposed ideas of what is best for each agency, we work with our agency customers to create and build the solutions that best meet their needs. From productivity, messaging and collaboration to CRM, storage, development and even virtual machines – Microsoft’s cloud offerings have not only already been tested across government enterprises and the largest commercial operations, but also meet and exceed the security and privacy compliance bars – from  FedRAMP and ISO27001 to CJIS, HIPAA, and beyond.

Microsoft also announced the private preview of the Azure Government Cloud which will have physical and logical isolation at all layers and it will be run by the government personnel.

Private Preview of the Azure government cloud – Last fall, we announced that Microsoft was going to create a cloud specifically for our government customers. Our progress has been significant in building on Windows commercial Azure capabilities to meet discrete needs of government customers. The Azure government cloud will have physical and logical isolation at all layers, it will be run by U.S. personnel with government background investigations and follow defense-in-depth, multi-level security practices. Today, we’re announcing that Azure government cloud private previews are taking place, as we work with customers to identify the workloads that best meet their key scenarios. Following these private previews, we’ll move to a limited public preview. This is in addition to our public Azure cloud offering, which already is FedRAMP certified.

Source: Microsoft