Julia White, corporate vice president for Azure, discussed Microsoft’s push to acquire more government cloud business. She points to 40 solutions that have been rolled out over the last six months. An Azure Government roadmap has also been published to show how Microsoft is committed to ongoing transparency. “Moving forward, we are simplifying our approach to regulatory compliance for federal agencies, so that our government customers can gain access to innovation more rapidly. In addition, we are adding new options for buying and onboarding cloud services to make it easier to move to the cloud.” Finally, we are bringing an array of new hybrid and edge capabilities to government to ensure that government customers have full access to the technology of the intelligent edge and intelligent cloud era,” White added. Microsoft has plenty of plans for government-specific customers, including increasing FedRAMP rating across 50 services. “By taking the broadest regulatory compliance approach in the industry, we’re making commercial innovation more accessible and easier for government to adopt,” White explained.
JEDI Bid?
Azure Secret Regions will be expanded and could be charting towards JEDI. If you are unfamiliar with JEDI, it is a $10 billion Pentagon cloud contract that Google this week backed out of bidding form. While Microsoft has made no official moves towards JEDI, this blog appears to be flirting with the US government. “We are making major progress in delivering this cloud designed to meet the regulatory and compliance requirements of the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community. Today, we are announcing these newest regions will be available by the end of the first quarter of 2019. In addition, to meet the growing demand and requirements of the U.S. Government, we are confirming our intent to deliver Azure Government services to meet the highest classification requirements, with capabilities for handling Top Secret U.S. classified data,” White added.
