Accelerating cloud capabilities for Government customers

At the Microsoft Government Tech Summit in Washington D.C. today, we are pleased to share a host of new capabilities for Azure Government customers as we take the next step forward in meeting the mission-critical needs of our U.S. Government customers.

Below you will find full detail on some of our key announcements. For a summary of the Tech Summit news, see the announcement from Tom Keane, Head of Global Infrastructure, Microsoft Azure:

Two new Azure Government Secret regions coming soon!

Further expanding our support for government workloads across a broad spectrum of data classifications, we’re excited to announce two new regions for Secret classified data that will be coming soon in the continental U.S. Designed and built specifically to support government agencies and partners who have Secret classified data workloads, these new regions will deliver multi-tenant cloud infrastructure and capabilities to U.S. Federal Civilian, Department of Defense, Intelligence Community and U.S. Government partners working within Secret enclaves.

Customers with Secret requirements gain access to the innovations we’re delivering throughout Azure Government, including cognitive capabilities, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics. These new regions bring us to a total of eight Azure Government regions, with two certified at DoD Impact Level 5 and two for Secret classified data.

New network services and new ExpressRoute locations

Two new ExpressRoute locations coming soon will bring fast, reliable, private connectivity to government customers in San Antonio and Phoenix for a new total of 8 ExpressRoute locations that offer choice, security, reliability, high connection speeds and low latency access to cloud resources. Customers can now use ExpressRoute Microsoft Peering to leverage Azure VPN, for data exchange with confidence and integrity and the ability to access Office 365 and all Azure PaaS services through Microsoft Peering.

Visualize your Azure Government network with Network Watcher, which provides the ability to monitor and diagnose network scenarios, with visualization tools to gain insights into your network.

Enhance security and performance by extending the VNET and identity directly to Azure Storage using Virtual Network Service Endpoints for Azure Storage. Create network rules for VNets and subnets, building a secure network boundary for data.

Increase performance and availability with Azure DNS, the service for name resolution, providing the ability to manage DNS records using the same credentials, and billing and support contract, as your other Azure services.

Faster, more efficient cloud development and management

Increase DevOps adoption with Azure DevTest Labs – coming soon to Azure Government, Azure DevTest Labs is the self-service sandbox environment in Azure to quickly create Dev/Test environments while minimizing waste and controlling costs. Azure Government customers can take advantage of this service to get around the common challenges of configuring and delivering environments to developers and testers at scale, production fidelity issues and resource optimization.

Government customers can use Azure DevTest Labs to address challenges such as improving resource use and cost optimization, modernizing legacy applications and IT infrastructure, employing agile development and DevOps with minimal organizational structure changes, and nurturing citizen developers in low-risk scenarios.

Rapidly build powerful solutions with Logic Apps – coming soon to Azure Government, Logic Apps delivers process automation and integrate applications and data across on-premise, public or private cloud environments. With Logic Apps Government agencies enhance productivity with business processes automation, EAI, B2B/EDI and services and applications integration leveraging most common out-of-the-box connectors for Azure services, Office 365, Dynamics CRM and more.

Logic Apps enables you to transform workflows into intelligent actions with machine learning and cognitive services. You can also build smart integrations from connecting SaaS applications and hybrid deployments.

Turn data into insights with Power BI Embedded – now available for Azure Government, Power BI Embedded provides a complete PaaS solution which enabling connection to hundreds of data sources up to date with real-time analytical insights. With Power BI Embedded, ISVs can quickly create, deploy, and manage data-rich applications using Power BI, to deliver stunning visuals, reports, and dashboards in their apps and connecting to hundreds of data sources to expose rich insights to customers

Unlock performance and efficiency with DV3 and EV3 VM sizes – deliver the full potential of these cutting-edge processers to support large VM sizes. These new sizes introduce Hyper-Threading Technology and the shift from physical cores to virtual CPU’s (vCPU) is a key architectural change that enables us to unlock power from the underlying hardware and harness performance and efficiency. These VM’s enable Nested Virtualization and Hyper-V Containers for the new VM size, enabling government customers to run a virtualized container host, set-up a Hyper-V lab in a virtualized environment, or to test multi-machine scenarios.

Continued momentum in compliance for government workloads

Expanding our support for the government’s highly sensitive workloads is a high priority. We continue to bring new services into our DoD Impact Level 5 Provisional Authorization including three new PaaS services – Azure Site Recovery, Backup and Azure App Service. In addition, we’ve expanded FedRAMP authorized service coverage to include eight new services, including Azure App Service, Azure Functions and Azure Stretch DB, providing government customers with more options for building new applications, moving data from on-premises datacenters to the cloud, and scaling virtual machines while maintaining the highest compliance standards.

New Authority to Operate (ATO) designations are helping government customers do more in the cloud. These include FedRAMP High ATOs for Azure Government for the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and a DoD Impact Level 4 ATO for the U.S. Air Force’s Common Computing Environment.

The Air Force is modernizing to achieve their mission, and with this recent ATO they’re building a PaaS-first environment to deliver modern apps and exploit the agility, scale, and global presence afforded by the cloud. The new ATO for ICE enables critical cloud services such as cloud-based identity and access, serving both employees and citizens using applications hosted in the cloud, built to handle the most sensitive unclassified data.

Read about all of our announcements today on the Azure Blog, and stay up-to-date on the latest announcements by subscribing to the Azure Government blog. We welcome your feedback and look forward to hearing from you.

To get started with Azure Government get your trial today!