Announcing Azure Stack for Azure Government customers to enable IT modernization and tactical edge scenarios
This post was contributed by Natalia Mackevicius, Program Director, Azure Stack at Microsoft.
Today, we’re announcing that Microsoft Azure Stack is now available to order for Azure Government customers. It was just a few months ago we shared our plans to integrate Azure Stack with our government-only cloud offering so agencies can benefit from a truly consistent hybrid cloud approach across identity, subscription, registration, billing, backup and disaster recovery solutions, and the Azure Marketplace.
Taking this product news a step further, we’ve also successfully completed a rigorous third party assessment and can now offer our government customers all the necessary documentation to expedite FedRAMP High certification for their workloads running on Azure Stack. This is in addition to our existing compliance assessment reports for PCI-DSS and the CSA Cloud Control Matrix. We know compliance is a priority and a challenge for our government customers and this delivers them a simpler route to meet their mission critical regulatory requirements.
Truly consistent hybrid innovation with Azure Government and Azure Stack
Azure Stack for Azure Government directly addresses many other significant challenges our top federal government customers face. This includes tough regulatory, connectivity, and latency requirements. This is possible because Azure Stack extends the best of our intelligent edge and cloud innovation and delivers those services anywhere in the environment through a hybrid approach.As a cornerstone of Microsoft’s hybrid cloud approach, consistency means government customers get the same infrastructure and services with Azure Stack as they do with Azure — the same APIs, DevOps tools, portal, and more. This means directives can be met faster because government customers can make a strategic choice about where to run their workloads and applications. Government customers can develop and deploy applications in Azure Government and then deploy on-premises using Azure Stack to meet data compliance, regulatory, or policy requirements. They can also move seamlessly with consistency between public, government-only, and on-premises cloud environments as the mission requires.
Azure Stack unlocks a wide range of hybrid cloud use cases for government customers
The availability of this game-changing hybrid solution unlocks a wide range of mission critical use cases for government customers. — whether that mission is as complex as driving real time decision-making at the tactical edge or efficiently modernizing legacy applications.
Decision-making at the tactical edge. In field operations, speed is of the essence and insights empower decisions. With Azure Stack for Azure Government, agencies can bring core and advanced cloud services to the edge —right to where they’re needed, making it possible to process data in the field without worrying about latency or internet connectivity. Users can perform intelligence gathering and analysis at the edge and run aggregated analytics in both connected or disconnected environments seamlessly. Together, these powerful cloud-based capabilities give critical missions, like those on the military’s tactical edge, the advantage that comes from immediate insight.
Accelerating the IT modernization timetable. With Azure Stack for Azure Government, agencies can also efficiently modernize their on-premises legacy applications that are not ready or a fit for the public cloud due to cyber defense concerns or other requirements. These applications can be moved without making any change in code, DevOps tools, processes, or people skills. Azure Stack also brings to government customers a core set of Azure services — containers, web apps and serverless computing. All this enables agencies to focus on delivering services instead of deploying and maintaining the infrastructure or training.
You can get started with Azure Stack by contacting our solution partners for more details on how to order integrated systems. Or, learn more about Azure Stack by downloading an Azure Stack Development Kit – a single server deployment designed for trial and proof of concepts.
