This month, however, Microsoft lost out on a US$10 billion cloud contract with the NSA. Microsoft was approved as a supplier of cloud services to the US intelligence community in 2018, and two years later was chosen, along with AWS, Google, Oracle, and IBM, as part of the multibillion-dollar C2E cloud contract- where the CIA will get each company to bid for specific task orders for itself and the 16 other agencies within the US intelligence community. Keane’s blog post highlighted that in order to develop a unified cybersecurity approach to protect the nation’s data, mission owners can utilize products informed by this threat intelligence, including Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel to integrate multiple security point solutions and continually assess, visualize, and protect the security state of resources in Azure, on-premises, and in other clouds. ĬYBERSECURITY Microsoft has been on a cybersecurity splurge to fight mounting threats In addition to those, Microsoft offers data analysis and AI services to government agencies through Azure’s Data Lake, Cosmos DB, HDIns i g h t, and Cognitive Services. There are now 73 services available on the Government Secret cloud.

Keane also shared that the Azure Government product portfolio was developed to further Microsoft’s “relentless commitment to the mission of national security.” Microsoft also revealed that it has added new services to Azure Government Secret, including Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Functions, and Azure App Service. What else is in Microsoft’s Azure offering? “Built into a unified data strategy, these services help human analysts more rapidly extract intelligence, identify trends and anomalies, broaden perspectives, and find new insights,” Keane said. The new regions, whose locations are not detailed, are launching with more than 60 Azure services, with more to come. As part of the process, the Azure regions are air-gapped. The data centers need to follow strict rules on construction, physical security features, and staffing checks. Source: Microsoftĭeveloped in collaboration with the US government, Microsoft’s Azure cloud has data centers organized into regions, with its own personnel comprising only US citizens and its own network fiber that is separate from the Azure commercial offering. Azure Government Top Secret is now generally available for US national security agencies.

Top secret government agencies