Microsoft revealed the thing that has been kept a secret. It talked about Azure Government Top Secret, a new cloud offering for those who want to manage confidential, classified data. The new offering is a part of Azure cloud available to the US government users, including Azure Government, Azure Government Secret, and the Azure public cloud.
Microsoft collaborates with the US government on getting accreditation for its Government Top Secret Cloud. According to the officials, the company completed the build-out of the new Azure Government Top Secret regions. The Microsoft executives pointed out a certain level of consistency in Azure technology; it enables development anywhere and code promotion to get along easily with higher classification levels.
Microsoft officials said, “Azure Government Top Secret is authorized by the DoD Impact Level 6 and Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 503. Windows Virtual Desktop is now available in Azure Government with FedRAMP High accreditation.” Additionally, it announced a new Government Secret functionality, which is used in the U.S. Department of Defense, law enforcement, and other agencies.
The existing features of Azure Government Top Secret are Microsoft’s Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Container Instances, Azure Sentinel (threat management service), and Azure Security Center.
On December 7, 2020, Microsoft announced availability zones for Azure Government. The feature of availability zones is especially for handling datacenter failures via redundancy and logical isolation of services. Azure Government adds to its Azure edge-computing devices, including Azure Modular Datacenter and ruggedized versions of Azure Stack Hub, Azure Stack Edge Pro, and Azure Stack Edge Mini R.
The Azure Modular Datacenter is a portable kind of an Azure Datacenter that currently runs Azure Slack. It is also available for government corporations and those who need portable data centers with an option of satellite connectivity. The Modular version is getting a new Network High Availability Module for network resiliency undermining multiple satellite connection partners in different orbits and high availability Power module.
