Jane Edwards
Tom Keane, corporate vice president for Azure global at Microsoft, said the company has secured authorization to operate for its Azure Government Top Secret cloud platform, enabling it to support national security agency clients with data workloads classified at the Top Secret level.
Keane wrote in a blog post published Tuesday that Microsoft achieved the ATO for the cloud offering in compliance with the Intelligence Community Directive 503 with facilities certified to meet ICD 705 standards.
The company is launching Azure Government Top Secret with over 60 initial services, including Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure App Service and Azure Functions.
Keane said such services could help mission owners dealing with highly sensitive data to deliver serverless workloads, containerized applications and web apps backed by security patching and infrastructure maintenance.
“With multiple geographically separate regions, Azure Government Top Secret provides customers with multiple options for data residency, continuity of operations, and resilience in support of national security workloads,” he wrote.
“Natively connected to classified networks, Azure Government Top Secret also offers private, high-bandwidth connectivity with Azure ExpressRoute. These new regions deliver a familiar experience and alignment with existing programs, enabling mission teams to build low and deploy high with consistency across governance, identity, development, and security,” Keane added.
He also announced that the company’s Azure Government Secret cloud offering now has 73 services.
