Microsoft recently announced the public preview of Azure Government: The cloud platform designed to meet the demands of the U.S. government. Azure Government delivers cloud speed, scale, and economics while addressing the security and compliance needs that exist in U.S. federal, state, and local government agencies. Azure Government offers physical and network isolation from non-U.S. government deployments and requires specialized personnel screening. In addition, specifically constructed datacenters ensure that all data hardware and supporting systems will physically reside in the continental United States. Azure Government will address government regulatory and compliance requirements such as FedRAMP, CJIS, ITAR, DoD Impact Levels 1-5 and HIPAA.
AIS was among the first partners invited to participate in the Azure Government Private Preview starting in April. Since this was done under non-disclosure, AIS was unable to announce this publically until now. Azure Government entered the public preview in August and is expected to reach general availability in December. AIS moved several of our development and testing (DEVTEST) workloads from projects at DoD, FBI and Texas Health and Human Services. AIS also implemented an FBI TIPS proof of concept application.
The Microsoft Azure data centers and public Azure platform have both FISMA (moderate) and FedRAMP (for both PaaS and IaaS services) accreditation. Microsoft’s public Azure cloud service was awarded an Authority to Operate (ATO) as a Moderate-Impact System in compliance with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) for the GSA IaaS BPA Storage lot back in June 2013 and their IaaS/PaaS FedRAMP P-ATO was granted in September of last year and is in the process of being renewed. Microsoft is expected to announce general availability of the Azure Government platform in December and they are going through the FedRAMP process for this platform as well. In a nutshell, Azure Government = Public Azure + network isolation + ITAR + CJIS + DoD Impact Level 1-5.
More information about Microsoft Azure Government can be found here:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/trust-center/compliance/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/features/gov/
