As I have been doing more and more Hybrid Cloud Foundation engagements with government agencies or companies that work in the US Federal space, I am always looking for the quick resources for the answers I need. Therefore, like most of my posts, they are really intended to collect, collate and distill just what I may need or find to be useful. Therefore, below are some of the key resources to help me, and hopefully you, to answer questions about the capabilities of our US federal cloud services which support the higher standards and requirements of our government agencies and also the companies that support them.
Microsoft Azure Government
- Why choose Azure Government? Get a Trial
- WATCH: Ignite 2017 Bring cloud innovation to your mission/services with Azure Government
- How we Secure Azure Government
- Department of Defense (DoD) in Azure Government
- Available Services in Azure Government
- Supported Regions aka.ms/Azure/Regions Click "Select Regions" on the left to filter for Azure Government
- Azure Government supports TIC capabilities
- Watch Azure Government Videos on Channel 9
- Find all compliance and security offerings at the Trust Center
- Azure Blueprint designed to facilitate the secure and compliant use of Azure for government agencies and third-party providers building on behalf of government.
- FedRAMP page. This is the one I access the most.
- Azure Government Documentation
- Planning Identity for Azure Government This is a very important consideration in your planning! In Azure Commercial (public), which is entirely separate from Azure Government, it has its own Azure Active Directory (AD). In Azure Government, likewise it has an entirely separate instance of Azure AD from the Commercial space. This becomes very important in considering authentication to applications like Office 365, which also can be in the Commercial or government space, which we'll highlight in the section below.
- Azure Government Blog - keep up to date with what is new!
Office 365 Government Community Cloud (GCC)
This is where your Identity information is important to know. Did you read that section above? Remember the mention about two different instances of Azure AD? The public or commercial cloud has a distinct and separate instance of Azure AD from Microsoft Government.
The part that gets tricky is that although we have two different flavors of O365 GCC i.e. government, the two versions do not use the same Azure AD as Azure Government uses. Below are the two versions as documented here.
- The Office 365 GCC environment provides compliance with Federal requirements for cloud services, including FedRAMP Moderate, and requirements for criminal justice and federal tax information systems (CJI and FTI data types).
- The Office 365 GCC High and DoD environments deliver compliance with Department of Defense Security Requirements Guidelines, Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations Supplement (DFARS), and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).
The point above is the Office 365 GCC uses the same Azure AD as the Commercial or public space of Azure, while Office 365 GCC High, uses the same Azure AD as Microsoft Azure Government.