From our commercial cloud to the tactical edge, we continue to deliver more innovation to empower government agencies to advance their mission. In addition to the recent product news enabling government to advance ‘tech intensity’, here are some recent highlights of new capabilities in Azure to support the full spectrum of government needs.

A priority for many government customers is accelerating their path to compliance in the cloud. We continue to lead the industry with the broadest compliance coverage and to advance new initiatives to accelerate and simplify your path to compliance:

Gain more options with the extension of our FedRAMP High Provisional Authorization to Operate (P-ATO) to all of our Azure public regions in addition to the Azure Government regions in the United States. Azure continues to support more services at FedRAMP High and Department of Defense Impact Level 5  than any other cloud provider, and we continue to drive to 100 percent FedRAMP compliance for all Azure services per our published listings and roadmap. Achieving FedRAMP High means that both Azure public and Azure Government data centers and in-scope services meet the demanding requirements of FedRAMP High, making it easier for more federal agencies and many state and local agencies to benefit from the cost savings and rigorous security of the Microsoft cloud.

In addition, you can use the Azure Blueprints service for quick, repeatable creation of fully governed cloud subscriptions, and you’ll continue to see new releases of our built-in Blueprints including NIST SP 800-53, PCI DSS, and a new built-in Blueprint for FedRAMP, helping customers proactively manage and monitor the compliance of their Azure environments.

Speed up your path to ATO with a new Azure compliance accelerator, a new program designed to expedite FedRAMP accreditation for software vendors building on Azure. With an extensive partner ecosystem, custom automation support, and expert guidance at each stage of the process – from architecture to deployment to P-ATO or ATO – the accelerator program simplifies and streamlines your path to compliance, helping you bring your solutions to government more quickly and cost-effectively. Contact us at https://aka.ms/azcl to learn more.

“We’re excited about the Microsoft Azure compliance accelerator program and we’re implementing the new Azure Blueprint service with built-in Blueprints to accelerate our path to FedRAMP ATO. This strategy will reduce both our time to market and costs. More importantly, we will be able to get important capabilities deployed into the mission environment of federal first responders with increased velocity.”

Alex Kreilein, CISO, RapidDeploy

Along with compliance, a top need of many government customers is migrating massive amounts of data to the cloud during modernization initiatives. We have tools and programs to support this:

Get hands-on support for your migration to Azure Government: For federal customers, FastTrack for Azure has a new White Glove Migration service that provides access to Azure engineers and a 10G ExpressRoute connection into Azure Government at our Chevy Chase office in Maryland. This high-touch service enables customers to quickly and confidently migrate their data using their own hardware or the Azure Data Box family of products. Learn more about the program and its eligibility criterial criteria by visiting FastTrack for Azure.

Migrate data faster with new database services: Accelerate your on-premises SQL Server migrations without changing the application code with Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, an evergreen SQL database now available in Azure Government. You can also use the Azure Database Migration Service to accelerate your transition to the cloud. No specialty skills are required to get reliable outcomes with this highly resilient and self-healing migration service.

Power up your tactical edge with a new rugged, portable, and battery-operated form factor of Data Box Edge: A single person can carry this appliance with them in the field for use in remote and disconnected areas. An AI-enabled edge computing appliance, Data Box Edge processes and analyzes data right at the tactical edge and transfers data to Azure Government when connected. It performs machine learning inferencing at the edge and transfers the data to Azure Government over network to retrain the machine learning model or perform aggregated data analytics.

Ship faster and operate with ease with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): This fully managed service, now available in Azure Government, offers serverless Kubernetes, an integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience, and enterprise-grade security and governance. Unite your development and operations teams on a single platform to rapidly build, deliver, and scale applications with confidence.

Discover new ecosystem innovation for government: As we continue our work to bring new services into Azure Government, we continue to foster a dynamic ecosystem of innovation to support government modernization. We currently have 286 marketplace partners and we’re seeing significant demand for these solutions on a monthly basis. Learn more about publishing to the marketplace.

As we continue to deliver more innovation to empower government agencies to modernize for the mission, we’d love to hear from you. I also invite you to join our Azure Government user community and regular meetups in Washington, DC.