Federal agencies continue to advance capabilities with Azure Government

Tom

January 24th, 2018

We’re continuing to see agencies advance their capabilities using Azure Government. Two agencies have recently issued new Authority to Operate (ATO) designations for Azure Government: the U.S. Air Force with a DoD Impact Level 4 ATO for its Common Computing Environment (CCE) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with a FedRAMP High ATO.

DoD Impact Level 4 ATO from the U.S. Air Force

The mission of today’s Air Force is to fly, fight and win in air, space, and cyberspace. The Air Force is building a modern foundation for this in the cloud, enabled by this new ATO and a shared application platform and hosting environment. They’ve built a PaaS-first environment and secure systems boundary in order to rapidly transform legacy systems into modern apps and exploit the agility, scale, and global presence afforded by the cloud.

The DoD Impact Level 4 ATO from the U.S. Air Force CCE Program validates that Azure Government meets the security and compliance standards necessary to handle controlled unclassified data for development, test, and production environments within the CCE architecture.

The CCE provides all the foundational cloud capabilities including networking, monitoring, access control, and identity, but also makes use of Azure PaaS services to re-imagine legacy applications. This limits the Air Force’s operational costs for monitoring and maintaining virtual infrastructure and provides a rapid path to application innovation. The CCE inherits Azure Government security controls by design, reducing operational costs and freeing up resources to focus on the mission.

We’re excited to see the U.S. Air Force building a cloud environment that can support future innovation and leapfrogging more traditional cloud migration strategies. By choosing a PaaS and shared services strategy for IT modernization, they’ve taken the accelerated path to reinventing their capabilities – fitting for an organization that does the impossible every day.

FedRAMP High ATO from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enforces federal laws governing border control, customs, trade and immigration to promote homeland security and public safety. ICE has more than 20,000 employees in more than 400 offices in the United States and 46 foreign countries.

The new FedRAMP High ATO validates that Azure Government meets all security and compliance standards necessary to handle ICE’s most sensitive unclassified data, including data that supports the core agency functions and protects against loss of life.

This ATO is a critical next step in enabling ICE to deliver such services as cloud-based identity and access, serving both employees and citizens from applications hosted in the cloud. This can help employees make more informed decisions faster, with Azure Government enabling them to process data on edge devices or utilize deep learning capabilities to accelerate facial recognition and identification.

ICE’s decision to accelerate IT modernization using Azure Government will help them innovate faster while reducing the burden of legacy IT. The agency is currently implementing transformative technologies for homeland security and public safety, and we’re proud to support this work with our mission-critical cloud.

Learn More

Microsoft is committed to providing the most trusted, comprehensive cloud for mission-critical workloads so that our nearly 6 million government users across 7,000-plus federal, state, and local organizations can achieve more in carrying out their mission-critical workloads.

Microsoft Azure Government leads the industry with 38 FedRAMP-approved services spanning both infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service offerings. A complete list of the Azure services covered under the Azure Government FedRAMP High ATO can be found by visiting the Microsoft Trust Center.

We welcome your comments and suggestions to help us continually improve your Azure Government experience. To stay up to date on all things Azure Government, click “Subscribe by Email!” on the Azure Government Blog. To explore Azure Government, request your free 90-day trial today. Or, check out purchasing options to get started now.