Microsoft Azure OpenAI Approved as a Service within the FedRAMP High Authorization for Azure Commercial

Bill Chappell

Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service is now included within the US Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High Authorization for Azure Commercial. This Provisional Authorization to Operate (P-ATO) within the existing FedRAMP High Azure Commercial environment was approved by the FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board (JAB). This milestone follows our previously announced solution enabling Azure Government customers to access Azure OpenAI Service in the commercial environment. With this latest update, agencies requiring FedRAMP High can directly access Azure OpenAI from Azure commercial.

Sign up here to get our learning series, Decoding AI: A Government Perspective, delivered to your inbox. This series will help you understand the complex components of AI, decode the jargon, and gain a practical, real-world understanding of Azure OpenAI service for government. 

FedRAMP High authorization represents the highest level of compliance with the stringent security standards required by the federal government for cloud service providers. With this authorization, government users and developers can integrate Azure OpenAI’s foundation models, such as GPT-4, GPT-3.5, and DALL-E, into their own cloud apps. The service provides high-performance AI models at production scale with industry-leading uptime.

Azure OpenAI service enables a wide variety of use cases to help government users support their unique missions, including the ability to:

1. Accelerate content generation: Automatically generate responses based on mission or project inquiries to help reduce the time and effort required for research and analysis, enabling teams to focus on higher-level decision-making and strategic tasks.
2. Streamline content summarization: Generate summaries of logs and rapid analysis of articles, analysts, and field reports.
3. Leverage Semantic search optimization: Improve the accuracy of search results by understanding the intent behind a user’s query.
4. Deliver Code generation and rectification: Generate code from natural language descriptions or fix errors in existing code.

To facilitate secure access to the Azure OpenAI Service for government tenants, we have developed a comprehensive guide on establishing secure connectivity between government and commercial tenants using Azure’s robust backbone. Refer to the “Unlock new insights with Azure OpenAI Service for government” article for step-by-step instructions on securely accessing the Azure OpenAI service from your government tenant.

The FedRAMP High authorization demonstrates our ongoing commitment to ensuring that government agencies have access to the latest AI technologies while maintaining strict security and compliance requirements. We look forward to empowering federal agencies to transform their mission-critical operations with Azure OpenAI and unlocking new insights with the power of Generative AI.

To learn more about how to effectively utilize the latest AOAI capabilities, sign up for upcoming learning modules here.

Bill Chappell Chief Technology Officer, Strategic Missions and Technologies

Follow