Microsoft Technology Associate provider company, Microsoft has confirmed that it now has permission, in the form of an Authorisation to Operate (ATO) as per the US Intelligence Community Directive.
It is a clearance to set up the Azure Government Top Secret region.
The Azure region will be live with 60 Azure cloud services in the beginning and more will be added to it in the future.
Azure will help more of the US intelligence agencies and authorities to shift to the cloud.
Tom Keane, corporate VP of Microsoft Azure Global said that these new Azure regions will improve and boost the delivery of the US Top Secret level workloads of national security.
Building the Azure region is a step in the direction of Microsoft’s plan to offer cloud services to the US government across all data classifications.
The company has already worked in close connection with the US intelligence community, the USDoD, and other federal civilian agencies. The company is proud that its team has worked closely with customers and partners from the intelligence field. These users are already leveraging Azure cloud regions to harness speedy data and scale it for better efficiency and operational advantage.
This news comes on the backdrop of another news where Microsoft Azure's competitor AWS has got a $10bn cloud contract with the US National Security Agency (NSA).
Microsoft claims that awarding a contract to AWS was a poorly evaluated decision by NSA.
As per the reports published by Computer Weekly, the single supplier JEDI contract is replaced with a multi-suppliers new contract.
In today's time, the state and local governments are expected to do more with less. They strive to satisfy demanding constituencies that expect classy and active services using minimum budget and staff.
Government bodies also need real-time and 24/7 access to data, devices, applications, and communications from anywhere using any app or tool. This is exactly why cloud solutions are relied upon.
How Do Azure Commercial and Azure Government Differ?
Azure Government is a unique cloud example for the U.S. government bodies and their solution providers such as:
State and local government authorities
The U.S. government entities in their governmental capacities
Government Partners who have deployed Azure Government
Private and commercial offices with regulated data
Microsoft offers a robust validation program to decide eligibility before companies can move their work to the Azure Government cloud.
A solution that offers compliance
Microsoft Cloud for Government is designed completely for the U.S. government to help its public sector customers, be it large federal agencies or small-town government to choose from a wide variety of cloud computing services.
Microsoft has made crucial changes and investments in data centres and strives to meet the U.S. federal IT compliance, mandates, state policies, and requirements. Microsoft also offers Sharepoint Application development and asp .net development services.
Microsoft Azure Government cloud platform is based on the crucial and fundamental principles of privacy, compliance, security, control, and transparency.
The U.S. Public sector entities enjoy a physically isolated Microsoft Azure Solution that runs on world-class security and compliance measures that are mandatory and important to the U.S.
government. All the systems and applications that are built on its architecture follow these compliance services.
These services involve FedRAMP, CJIS state-level agreements, DoD compliance certifications, the right to issue HIPAA Business Associate Agreements, and backs IRS 1075.
Microsoft Azure Government mingles with various hybrid scenarios of developing and employing on-premises or cloud solutions. Microsoft Azure Government also offers instant scalability and ensures quality uptime which public sector companies need.
Available Services in Azure Government
Usually, almost all of the services that are available in Azure commercial are present in Azure Government with the below-given areas either not present or present only as a small subset of products:
US GOV Arizona (coming soon)
Azure Data Analytics
Azure U.S. Regions
US DOD Central
Azure AD
AI and Cognitive Services
Developer Tools
US GOV Iowa
US GOV Texas (coming soon)
US GOV Virginia
US DOD East
Microsoft is the Government Cloud provider that has:
DoD Impact Level 5 readiness.
Microsoft is the only commercial cloud solution platform that offers a cloud solution that comes with DoD Impact Level 5 readiness when it comes to productivity services, platform, and infrastructure.
Signed CJIS agreements in 23 states.
Microsoft has entered into Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) contracts with 23 states. This means it covers over 60% of the U.S.
population. Microsoft is in a leading position here as compared to its competitors. This contract is helping agencies boost and improve trust, transparency, and relationships.
Six dedicated government U.S. data centres.
Microsoft government Cloud is the only government cloud that has six data centre regions. It hence comes with the widest geographic presence and diversity, along with 500-mile geo-redundancy, across the east, west, south, and Midwest regions.
Microsoft bi-coastal, government-only data centres provide data replication in various areas of the U.S. for better continuity.
Largest compliance portfolio.
Microsoft boasts of the deepest and widest compliance certifications for a cloud provider. It comes with a platform, infrastructure, and productivity services.
Apart from the 23 CJIS states and DoD Impact Level 5 readiness, the company is ready to put its government compliance in writing, involving the health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) 1075 Encryption Requirements, and the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, among others. This compliance allows the company to address all the regulations customers need.
Formal eligibility process.
Microsoft is the only government cloud service provider that offers an exclusive, robust screening process for every incoming request to decide eligibility to store data in the cloud.
What is Microsoft Azure?
Microsoft Azure cloud solutions is a public cloud platform that offers over 200 products and services that are accessible across the public internet.
Azure oversees and maintains the infrastructure, hardware, and resources. One can access these for free or on a pay-per-use basis, and on-demand basis.
Since it was launched in 2008, Azure cloud solutions has become the second-largest of the top three public cloud platforms following Amazon Web Services (AWS) and followed by Google Cloud Platform.
Microsoft Azure is a popular pick in the enterprise landscape too. The company claims that 95% of Fortune 500 companies use Azure.
As per Flexera, for the past few years, Microsoft is using legacy footholds to attract reluctant organizations to the cloud.
This is helping in positive Azure adoption in enterprises while AWS progress in this scope is relatively dull.
Traditionally, when it comes to hybrid deployment Azure is preferred for its capacity to sync with legacy Microsoft solutions.
Usage and interest in Azure is growing
Cloud Guru has recently published a State of Cloud Learning report, as per which, cloud engineers are increasingly interested in Microsoft Azure courses and training as compared to Google Cloud and AWS courses.
Migrating to the cloud service, be it Azure or any other cloud service helps organizations save the cost and complexity of buying and running resources on site.
The history of Microsoft Azure
Today's popular Microsoft Azure was launched as and known as Project Red Dog in 2008. The term Azure is taken from a sky blue colour one finds in the crayon box.
Read the blog- How Effective is Microsoft Azure as a Cloud Computing System? A Review
Azure Infrastructure and Regions
At present Azure has around 67 existing and announced regions across the world, over 160 physical data centres, N number of availability zones, and users in millions.
But do you know how it all works?
Talking about the cloud structure of Azure, it has a worldwide network of data centres, availability zones, and regions.
These regions are strategically placed in a way that they serve as many cloud customers as possible. These regions are spread across South brazil, West India, Central U.S., South Africa North, East Australia and anything in-between and many more areas.
Each of these regions hosts one or more availability zones and data centres that are built using independent power cooling and networking to ensure that the services in these zones will run without hassle or pause. This is true even if one of the parts becomes unavailable.
Azure also considered geographies.
These are made up of more than a single region and they help customers with particular data residency and compliance needs to keep the apps and data close.
Geography is a distinctive market known for doing just that.
Government regions
Azure also offers dedicated government regions that are accessible only to U.S. government bodies and partners. These regions are more stringent in terms of compliance with government regulations, and their locations are kept secret.
Azure services can vary by region
When we talk about Azure services, they are not created equally. Some demand more resources and some are less popular than others.
Hence, you will not find every service in every region. However, excluding the government regions and newly formed regions, most of the Azure cloud solutions are available in every region.
Premium services such as Azure Machine Learning are only offered in one region of every geography.
Azure IaaS vs SaaS vs PaaS
To understand Azure infrastructure, you need to understand the basic pillars: storage, network, and compute. Everything you see or find in Azure is developed on these three pillars.
These are the foundation of the cloud infra too. If you wish to build your own architecture, you can do so using infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) products like Azure VMs, Azure Disc Storage, Azure Virtual Networks, and Azure VDI.
Or you can leverage the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) such as Azure SQL and app services of Azure. Though all these are developed using these three pillars, they provide varied layers of abstraction to help you build your business application.
Is Azure right for you?
If you compare Azure to the other cloud service providers, it is certainly in the top three along with AWS and GCP.
AWS enjoys the largest market share, but Azure boasts most regions, and GCP is progressing rapidly.
Here are Azure pros and strengths
If you want to decide which platform is right for you and if Azure would be the correct choice for you, you will have to know its pros and cons.
There is no better way of knowing a technology than understanding its benefits and drawbacks. Know if it will perform the way you expect? Would it be within your budget? Which cloud computing service will offer you the different levels of abstraction through PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS.
Every service has its uniqueness. Let us know the pros.
First, Azure has many data centres, the company keeps adding to them. This also means your apps and services will always be reachable and accessible for your customers.
This also means regulations of specific countries regarding cloud services will be met.
As Microsoft is helping on-premises customers for over 40 years now, the company has an extensive hybrid cloud service that can get all the existing customers into the cloud.
These services can be integrated well with existing tools and technologies including Active Directory, Visual Studio, and File Storage. If you are a company with an application written in the .Net framework, Azure is for you and it is a no brainer. Azure holds most of the industry certifications and it comes in handy while operating in certain countries or sectors.
Azure cons and weaknesses
Well, there are not many cons of Azure, but let us take a look at a couple of them. As. azure is trying to offer comprehensive or umbrella services to all the cloud computing crowds, they sometimes delay to not offer enough attention to a few services.
This can also mean that if you have made new data analytics service that runs on a certain Azure feature, then it might fall behind a bit.
Additionally, Azure will do its best to keep up with each trend in cloud computing, so the number of services (new and old and renamed) available to serve you can be overwhelming.
Here, as a smart business or individual, you better focus on the services that you need for your work.
Here are some use cases of Azure cloud solutions and projects.
Hybrid cloud
Let’s start this journey with hybrid clouds. Microsoft has been supplying on-premises computer systems for many years.
Many of these customers are still available in the market and are being used. These users are not going to throw away these computer systems and buy a new one just because "cloud" is written on it.
However, most companies find switching to Azure cloud solutions valuable. Azure makes it easy for these companies to implement hybrid cloud strategies.
For example, Azure Sentinel lets you monitor both cloud assets and on-prem services. Usually, hybrid setups are at the risk of inadequate security, but Sentinel express route and VPN gateways eliminate this concern.
Cosmos DB
If we are talking about Azure, Cosmos DB needs a mention. It is undoubtedly one of the most important services on Azure.
This is a single-digit millisecond latency, which comes with an automatic and instantly scalable global secure SQL database that lets you leverage cloud service the most. If you are a company that serves a global client base then deploying Cosmos DB can help you offer an exceptional experience to the end-users.
All you have to do is plus Cosmos DB into the front-end application. You can enjoy the speed at any scale. You can plug it into your app easily. As the service is managed end to end, users do not have to worry about maintenance or servers.
Plus, Cosmos DB is cost-effective. Sharepoint development servicesis another service offered by Microsoft that helps in building websites, storing, organizing, sharing data, etc.
Let us take a look at Microsoft Azure FAQs
What is Microsoft Azure?
It is a public cloud platform that offers over 200 products and services. These services are accessible over the public internet.
When did Azure launch?
It was announced first in 2008 as Project Red Dog, since then Azure has not looked back. As of 2021, Azure holds 20% of the market share.
What are Azure Regions?
Azure has a worldwide network of data centres and availability zones. Each region holds of one or more data centres and availability zones.
How does Azure work?
Azure is a cloud computing service. Azure oversees and maintains resources, infrastructure, and hardware in data centres.
These assets are accessible to individuals and businesses for free or charge (per use) basis. Azure users can leverage powerful, and cost-prohibitive solutions without a big investment.
What is Azure used for?
Azure cloud solutions include Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and serverless.
Why do we need Azure?
Azure users can build, run, and manage apps and solve multiple technical issues across the clouds and on-premises data centres.
