Microsoft Azure Gains U.S. Certification
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella came to Washington this week to promote the government version of its Azure cloud platform.
Nadella announced U.S. general availability of Microsoft Azure Government during a company-sponsored cloud summit. He also announced future availability of a cloud-based customer management tool.
The federal cloud announcement follows certification under FedRAMP, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, which proscribes government security standards for commercial cloud vendors.
Microsoft's Office 365 email service secured FedRAMP certification in November.
Nadella said "Azure Government" along with Office 365 and a new offering called Dynamics CRM Online would be offered as a cloud computing package to federal agencies as well as state and local governments.
While the U.S. Navy and the state of Texas are deploying Microsoft's Office 365, the state of Alabama is launching a hybrid cloud initiative that will use Azure Government to host and manage the state's Medicaid health information exchange. It is also being used for enrolling residents in a statewide family caregiver program.
Microsoft also reported that Texas officials are planning to use Azure Government for a criminal justice information security initiative. The project would allow law enforcement agencies to shift some of their operations to Azure Government.
In announcing federal cloud certification, Microsoft said integrated cloud services including computing, storage, data, networking and applications would be hosted at Microsoft datacenters. The U.S. datacenters would be managed by "cleared U.S. personnel."
The company pitches Azure Government as a hyperscale hybrid cloud platform that enables government agencies to run operating systems, languages and applications from either the company's government cloud, public cloud or their own datacenter. As more government datacenters are consolidated, its more likely that federal agencies will use cloud vendors' infrastructure as a way to save money.
Widespread government use of Office 365 by federal agencies cloud give Azure Government a leg up as Microsoft competes with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform for government customers. Both AWS and Google have gained federal cloud certification, and AWS is a cloud vendor for U.S. intelligence agencies.
Microsoft is positioning its federal cloud offering as a way for government users to integrate on premises infrastructure with cloud platforms and datacenters.
As with Office 365, Microsoft is stressing other cloud services as a way of attracting potential government customers for Azure Government. Hence, it noted that King County, Washington, is migrating government services and related workloads to the newly announced Dynamics CRM Online offering, which will be generally available in January.
The new service is based on Microsoft's public cloud offering that is also aimed at FedRAMP compliance and would be operated by government-certified administrators. Microsoft said the cloud application could run on existing on-premise infrastructure while still providing secure access to public sector applications and workflows.
