Microsoft Azure Government and Booz Allen Announce Virtual Cloud Defense

Derek Strausbaugh, Principal Program Manager

Cloud Security Suite Brings Power and Simplicity to Securing Cloud Deployments

Microsoft and Booz Allen Hamilton are pleased to announce the general availability of Virtual Cloud Defense (VCD) for Azure Government.

Virtual Cloud Defense from Booz Allen helps Azure Government customers secure cloud workloads and protect data by deploying cost-effective cloud workload protection and security services. VCD builds upon Microsoft Azure’s unprecedented investments in cloud security and compliance and integrates third party best-of-breed, commercially available and government solutions provided through the Azure Government Marketplace to meet Federal Government and DoD security and assurance requirements.

The Virtual Cloud Defense solution enables organizations to fulfill the benefits that they expect from the cloud—improved performance and near infinite scale, agility to respond to changing demands, lower costs, and a transition from capital expenses to operational expenses for infrastructure. Whether building custom applications, migrating existing applications, or integrating commercial or government off-the-shelf solutions, deploying Virtual Cloud Defense in an organization’s environment provides immediate benefit.  Virtual Cloud Defense defines network and application architectures compliant with HIPPA, NIST and DoD cloud computing requirements, simplifies the deployment of virtual security appliances and security solutions and provides comprehensive situational awareness by providing analytics on activities within the virtual network, subnet, virtual machine guest operating systems and applications.

Virtual Cloud

Key Features of Virtual Cloud Defense

  • Encryption of Data at Rest: with native Azure and third-party solutions that offer encryption of cloud storage, data is protected from unintentional disclosure and malicious activity
  • Network Traffic Inspection and Protection: in-line packet inspection and passive SSL decryption of traffic into and out of Azure Government, as well as between Azure virtual machines and virtual networks, detects and blocks intrusions and other malicious traffic
  • Log Aggregation, Dashboards, and Analytics: the collection and analysis of security events and configurations range from network appliances, cloud infrastructure, operating systems, and applications to support security operations, auditing, and executive reporting
  • Identity and Authentication Services: integration of these services with Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) supports Common Access Card (CAC) and multi-factor authentication for hosted applications and management functions
  • Network Tiering: a framework for restricting traffic between zones, based on user-defined criteria, VCD’s network tiering provides logical network segregation of security zones, user planes, data planes, and management planes
  • Deployment Automation: Azure Resource Manager expedites initial setup and configuration

In addition to providing this suite of core security services, Booz Allen can tailor the Virtual Cloud Defense architecture to provide additional services to meet the organization’s cost and risk profile. Whether an organization needs to protect a few or dozens of applications in the cloud, Booz Allen’s Virtual Cloud Defense for Azure Government scales to meet the security requirements of both small and large organizations.  For more information, please contact the Virtual Cloud Defense team at Booz Allen.

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, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed and to receive emails, click “Subscribe by Email!” on the Azure Government Blog. To experience the power of Azure Government for your organization, sign up for an Azure Government Trial.

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