This week, Microsoft Azure announced that Azure Government was awarded High Impact Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO), the highest level of accreditation for the Federal government’s FedRAMP certification for cloud providers. The high impact level certification allows Azure to handle workloads that, if breached, could have a severely adverse effect on “organizational operations or, assets, or individuals.” In addition, Microsoft Azure is on track to obtain DISA Impact Level 4 Authorization in the near future and also announced the opening of two new regions for the Department of Defense, namely, U.S. DoD East and U.S. DoD West. Azure also revealed details of its support for requirements elaborated by the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) with respect to database security and encryption. Taken together, this week’s announcements illustrate the depth of Microsoft’s investments in meeting rigorous Federal government cloud computing requirements and standards and its continued interest in expanding its footprint in the government cloud computing space. Read more about Azure’s support for Federal government cloud computing here.
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