Oct 17 2017. Washington D.C.
Today at the Government Cloud Forum 2017, Microsoft announced a secret cloud service built for government agencies to work better. The Azure service is called Azure Government Secret, a cloud and blockchain based service will be available to government agencies to securely build applications for the cloud.
From the announcement:
Today at Microsoft Government Cloud Forum in Washington D.C., we’re announcing a number of important advances for Azure Government, the dedicated cloud for our U.S. Government customers and their partners. We’re expanding our support for highly-classified workloads, delivering advanced technologies like Blockchain and support for High Performance Computing, and increasing our available security capabilities with Azure Security Center. In addition, we’re launching Citrix VDI on Azure Government to help our government customers deliver user workloads from the cloud.
At last year's Government Cloud Forum Azure Government was the first government-only cloud to be awarded Information Impact Level 5 DoD Provisional Authorization by the Defense Information Systems Agency. On our anniversary, we’re proud to be the only provider to deliver a physically isolated cloud that is DoD Impact Level 5-ready for infrastructure, platform, and productivity services serving every branch of the military and the defense agencies the greatest number L5 services in the market.
Taking the next step forward in meeting the mission-critical and data needs of our U.S. Government customers, we are announcing expansion plans to make Azure Government Secret available to support government agencies and partners who have Secret classified data. Azure Government Secret will deliver multi-tenant cloud infrastructure and cloud capabilities to U.S. Federal Civilian, Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and U.S. Government partners working within Secret enclaves. Customers with Secret requirements can expect to gain access to new technologies at scale, including services such as cognitive capabilities, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics.
We view blockchain as a major technological advancement with the potential for significant impact in many industries, including the public sector, through its ability to enable verifiable and immutable cross-party computation. At its core, a blockchain is a data structure that’s used to create a digital transaction ledger that, instead of resting with a single provider, is shared among a distributed network of computers. Blockchain technologies deployed on Azure are applicable to many complex problems facing government today, including distribution of funds after natural disasters, registration of property ownership, and other issues involving tracking ownership of funds or assets through multiple transactions. Today we’re launching Blockchain for Azure Government, which will support a wide array of our Azure blockchain and distributed ledger marketplace solutions. These solutions automate the deployment and configuration of blockchain infrastructure across multiple organizations, allowing our customers to focus on government transformation and application development.