Microsoft completed the buildout of a new, top secret cloud service for federal agencies, aiming to host some of the government’s most sensitive workloads.
The product—Azure Government Top Secret—is listed among an array of new cloud-centered offerings the company’s Corporate Vice President of Azure Global Tom Keane unveiled in a blogpost early Monday, kicking off the company’s Government Leaders Summit.
“We've been working with the government on building this top secret cloud for some time,” Keane told Nextgov in an interview Thursday, adding that the federal accreditation process for the product is “well underway.”
Cloud service providers that work with the Pentagon must prove that they abide by specific security requirements depending on the sensitivity of the data they will host. Lower “impact levels” handle data cleared for public release, while impact level six, or IL6, encompasses classified national security information. That level is right below the highest level of “Top Secret” for classified material.
Earlier this year, Azure Government Secret received provisional authority to operate at IL6. Cloud rival Amazon Web Services is the only company cleared to host the government’s most highly classified, top secret materials in the cloud.
Azure Top Secret will mark a “natural extension” to the cloud-based services intelligence community and Pentagon agencies are already tapping into, Keane noted. Since the beginning of its cloud journey almost a deca ..
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