Microsoft Azure Government

Azure Government is the cloud organized for support of strategic state scenarios for the government organizations of the USA.

Priorities when developing service: speed, scaling, security and compliance to requirements, profitability.

The cloud of Azure Government is developed taking into account need to provide the raised security level and compliances to requirements for confidential, special workloads of public sector of the USA. Among such loadings there is, for example, a federal program of the USA for risk management and authentication (FedRAMP), the solution Enterprise Cloud Service Broker (ECSB) of the Ministry of Defence, information services of criminal justice (CJIS) and the law on security policy and data protection of health facilities (HIPAA).

Control panel window screenshot service, (2016)

The cloud of Azure Government contains principal components of infrastructure as services (IaaS) and platforms as services (PaaS). In their structure infrastructure, network, storage, data management, management of certificates, other numerous services. Azure Government supports the same opportunities which clients of public Azure, for example, synchronous geographical replication of data and automatic scaling use.

The cloud offers a number of the components guaranteeing data security of the state organizations of the USA, providing opportunities:

• The physical and isolated from network copy. The Azure Government environment is the separate copy which is completely isolated from a public cloud of Azure. It is used only by the state organizations of the USA having the right to it and solution providers.
• Security, confidentiality and compliance to requirements. The Microsoft corporation implemented reliable infrastructure of security management, confidentiality and compliance and also implemented additional strict controls for meeting requirements of higher level which are shown according to levels of influence of the solution ECSB and also services CJIS.
• Data warehouse. The Azure Government environment supports two data processing centers operating at distance more than 1.2 thousand kilometers from each other. All managed data about clients are stored in the data processing centers located in a continental part of the USA (CONUS).
• Personnel with the American citizenship. As operators and administrators of a subscription of Azure for the state organizations only the citizens of the USA who underwent the corresponding testing work.
• Management of certificates. Control of certificates in the environment of Azure is exercised in a separate copy of Azure Active Directory.
• Compliance to requirements. The Microsoft corporation constantly invests means for maintenance of compliance to the strict and constantly changing federal, regional and local requirements which are imposed to cloud solutions for public institutions of the USA (for example, FedRAMP, CJIS, ECSB, HIPAA and IRS 1075).
• Cloud integration. Azure Government offers an integrated environment with Office 365 Government which allows to execute a uniform input in cloud services and also provides providing expanded services, such as use of OneDrive storage with a capacity of 1 TB.

The cloud allows the organizations to support the existing investments into technologies and to use advantages of cloud services. Azure Government is a compatible cloud platform with products and technologies which can be used by the organizations for creation of more opened applications from scratch. The agencies have an opportunity to select means, services, operating systems, architecture and platforms, including Windows, Linux, Oracle, SharePoint, .NET, Java, PHP and Node.js, for the cloud solutions.

Microsoft Azure Government functions For December, 2016 Azure Goverment has the services available in regions of states of US GOV IOWA and US GOV VIRGINIA:

• Virtual machines
• Cloud services
• Storage
• Active Directory
• Scheduler
• Virtual network
• SQL database
• Files of Azure
• Services of carriers
• Manager of traffic
• Service Bus
• StorSimple
• Cash Redis
• Service of archiving Azure
• Automation
• ExpressRoute
• etc.