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Eight new service offerings added to Azure Government certification scope
We are pleased to announce the addition of Azure Resource Manager, Automation, Azure Batch, Log Analytics, Azure Media Services, Policy Administration Service/RBAC, Redis Cache, and Scheduler to certification scope in Microsoft Azure Government.
Each of these service offerings has received Joint Authorization Board (JAB) approval for addition to Azure Government’s P-ATO at the High Impact Level. With the addition of these eight offerings, the total number of Azure Government offerings that meet the FedRAMP High baseline grows to 26 services; 20 more services than AWS GovCloud.
These services may be used by Federal, DoD and state and local government customers and partners building solutions on Azure Government who are required to meet rigorous compliance standards such as FedRAMP High, DISA L4, CJIS, ITAR, and IRS 1075. The Azure Blueprint program is designed to facilitate the secure and compliant use of these and other Azure Government service offerings by providing solution accelerators and guidance concerning customer security responsibilities when architecting solutions in Azure.
About these services
Azure Resource Manager – Azure Resource Manager (ARM) enables you to repeatedly deploy your app and have confidence your resources are deployed in a consistent state. You define the infrastructure and dependencies for your app in a single declarative template. This template is flexible enough to use for all of your environments such as test, staging or production.
You put resources with a common lifecycle into a resource group that can be deployed or deleted in a single action. You can see which resources are linked by a dependency. You can apply tags to resources to categorize them for management tasks, such as billing as well as control who in the organization can perform actions on the resources by defining roles for users and groups. ARM logs all user actions so you can audit those actions.
Automation – Azure Automation uses Windows PowerShell scripts and workflows – known as runbooks – to handle the creation, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of Azure resources and third-party applications. Automation runbooks work with Web Apps in Azure App Service, Azure Virtual Machines (Windows or Linux), Azure Storage, Azure SQL Database, and any service that offers public Internet APIs.
Azure Batch – Azure Batch makes it easy to run large-scale parallel and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads in Azure. Use Batch to scale out parallel workloads, manage the execution of tasks in a queue, and cloud-enable applications to offload compute jobs to the cloud.
Log Analytics – Log Analytics is a service in Operations Management Suite that helps you collect and analyze data generated by resources in your cloud and on-premises environments. It gives you real-time insights using integrated search and custom dashboards to readily analyze millions of records across all of your workloads and servers regardless of their physical location.
Azure Media Services – Azure Media Services offers broadcast-quality video streaming services to reach larger audiences on today’s most popular mobile devices. With features that enhance accessibility, distribution, and scalability, Media Services makes it easy and cost-effective to stream and protect your content to audiences both local and worldwide.
Policy Administration Service/RBAC – Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) enables fine-grained access management for Azure. Using RBAC, you can grant only the amount of access that users need to perform their jobs.
Redis Cache – Based on the popular open source Redis cache—Redis Cache gives you access to a secure, dedicated cache for your Azure application usage. It leverages the low-latency, high-throughput capabilities of the Redis engine. This separate, distributed cache layer allows your data tier to scale independently for more efficient use of compute resources in your application layer.
Scheduler – Azure Scheduler lets you invoke actions that call HTTP/S endpoints or post messages to a storage queue on any schedule. You can use Scheduler to create jobs that reliably call services either inside or outside of Azure and run those jobs on demand, on a regular or irregular schedule, or at a future date.
Azure is dedicated to expanding the number of offerings available to government customers and will continue to provide updates through our blog as well as adding covered offerings to the Microsoft Trust Center.
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Microsoft Azure Government Becomes First Major Gov Cloud to Achieve FedRAMP JAB P-ATO
By Susie Adams as written on Microsoft.com
This week, Microsoft announced new compliance milestones for Azure Government which included a number of key security safeguards, from FedRAMP JAB P-ATO to Microsoft contractually committing to meeting HIPAA requirements in Azure Government (by offering a Business Associates Agreement (BAA) to supporting compliance with IRS 1075 safeguards for processing accessing federal tax information in the cloud.
All of these are important – for governments of all sizes. And each of these on their own are significant milestones in the lifetime of Azure Government, which has only been generally available to customer since last December. It shows Microsoft’s commitment to recognizing the security and compliance standards that are important to our customers and to driving towards alignment with each of them.
I’d like to focus on one that is particularly notable in the Federal space, namely the FedRAMP JAB P-ATO, confirmed by FedRAMP this month as approved for use by all U.S. government agencies. This achievement is particularly significant as Azure Government is the first major government cloud platform to receive a FedRAMP JAB P-ATO for its Iaas and PaaS solutions. This is essentially the “gold seal” of approval on security controls for our Azure Government platform. JAB approval means that our solution had to pass muster with the JAB board consisting of approvals from GSA, DHS, and DoD technical reviewers.
This announcement comes on the heels of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) granting a FedRAMP ATO for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Government cloud. Together, these important milestones build on Microsoft’s commitment to providing the most complete and trusted cloud environment to its customers.
It also rounds out our Gov cloud with Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online Government. The JAB and Agency approved cloud workloads and partner solutions ready to go NOW is unmatched in the Federal industry. In fact, Microsoft is the only major cloud vendor that offers a hybrid cloud solution that is designed to support the rigorous compliance and security demands of government, healthcare, public safety and defense agencies.
Microsoft Azure Government is a government-community cloud that offers hyper-scale compute, storage, networking, and identity management services, with world-class security. A physical and network-isolated instance of Microsoft Azure, operated by screened U.S. persons, Azure Government enables new forms of cross-agency collaboration and rich cloud service integration. Learn more.
The Azure Government 90 day trial includes $500 per month to spend on all Azure Government services. This is a non-renewable, fixed term free trial agreement. Customers and partners who wish to continue to use Azure Government after 90 days must have a Volume Licensing agreement in place.
Managed Solution partners with IT staff to offer consulting and government solutions to improve IT infrastructure to reflect the latest technology.
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