Just a day after Amazon Web Services (AWS) celebrated its 10th birthday, Microsoft has announced major updates in its Azure Government sector. The biggest development is the fact that the company has announced the launch of two new Azure data centers specifically meant for the US Department of Defense.
However, providing services to the Defense Department isn’t new for the Redmond giant in any way. The company states that Azure Government is restricted to only a targeted set of Government Agencies and their solution providers. These include federal, state, local, tribal and the Department of Defense.
The company hasn’t shared many specifics about the data centers. The regions, Microsoft says, are designed to meet DISA Impact Level 5. They will be known as DoD East and DoD West and are specifically blueprinted to handle to DoD workloads and data at Level 5.
Impact Level 5 data includes CUI that requires a higher level of protection, including that of unclassified National Security Systems. It can only be processed in a dedicated infrastructure that ensures physical separation of DoD customers from non-DoD tenants,
the blog post announcing the new development reads.
These new DoD regions will be designed to meet specific controls and commitments defined in the DoD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (SRG) that require the specific engineering controls in place for data permitted to be stored in the cloud. Availability of these new regions is planned for later this year.
The US Department of Defense includes entities like the Army, Navy, Air Force, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) etc. And the new data centers with their high security will surely be of assistance in each sector.
In light of this announcement, a similar approach could be adapted by the Indian Government, too, for secure and encrypted data storage and accessing. Microsoft has previously launched and undertaken many commercial local data centers in the subcontinent for both nodal as well as government agencies use and looking at how data breached continue to happen in within Government infrastructures, Azure Government could just be the step towards a more secured digital frontier for India.
