Azure Government
Updates for building solutions across Microsoft's Clouds for Government
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CIS Hardened Images now available in Azure Government
Overview of CIS Hardened Images As more government workloads shift from on-premises to cloud-based environments, virtual images (sometimes called virtual machines images) are gaining momentum as a cost-effective option for projects with limited resources to purchase, store, and maintain hardware. A virtual image is a template of an operating system (OS) or application environment installed on software that imitates dedicated hardware. When using virtual images, many government customers still need to demonstrate compliance with the DOD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide, and may look to images that hav...
Nasuni supports Azure Government for more scalable file storage and improved cross-office collaboration
This blog is a guest post by Tom Rose, vice president, Product Marketing, Nasuni - Microsoft Azure Global ISV of the Year. Nasuni's cloud file services platform is backed by Azure object storage and helps government agencies store, archive, protect, synchronize, and collaborate on fast-growing unstructured data at scale. This article outlines best practices for government agencies faced with the challenges of storing, sharing, and protecting rapidly growing file data, and explains how the Nasuni global file system with Azure Government storage works for agencies needing to consolidate outdated NAS and file ser...
Trusted Internet Connection guidance for Azure IaaS and PaaS solutions
This post was contributed by Susie Adams, Chief Technology Officer Microsoft Federal, and Diego Lapiduz, Chief Information Security Architect - Azure Government at Microsoft. Many government customers that are working to optimize security in the cloud have asked for guidance on how to align with the policies set by the Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) Initiative. A common myth is that this is possible for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) but not for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions. To help agencies be as efficient as possible in their transition to the cloud, we recently published new Trusted Interne...
Announcing the launch of Azure M-series VMs with up to 4TB RAM in USGov Arizona region
We are excited to announce the launch of Azure M-series Virtual Machines in the USGov Virginia region. Azure M-series VMs offer memory from 192 GB up to 4 TB on a single VM with configurations from 8 to 128 hyper-threaded vCPUs, powered by Intel® Xeon® 2.5 GHz E7-8890 v3 processors. The Azure M-series is perfectly suited for your in-memory workloads like SAP HANA and SQL Hekaton. With the M-series, these databases can load large datasets into memory and utilize the fast memory access with huge amounts of vCPU parallel processing to speed up queries and enable real-time analytics. M-series VMs are SAP certified ...
Machine Learning on Azure Government with HDInsight
In this episode of the Azure Government video series, Steve Michelotti sits down to talk with Yujin Hong, Program Manager on the Azure Government Engineering team, about Machine Learning on Azure Government with HDInsight. There are endless applications of Artificial intelligence in the Government space, from predictive analytics to object recognition. Steve and Yujin discuss the various AI offerings such as the Data Science VM and ML Server, then do a deep dive into Azure HDInsight. The HDInsight service deploys and provisions Apache Hadoop clusters into the Azure Cloud, providing a software framework designe...
Azure Government Marketplace expanding with new Pay-As-You-Go offers
As part of our rapidly growing solution marketplace for Azure Government, we’d like to announce several new Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) marketplace offers. These new offers enable our government customers to purchase marketplace solutions directly through Azure Government, streamlining the procurement process. In addition, our partners can use this new capability to provide expanded solution offerings and a streamlined procurement process to government customers. For example, see the below hardened images from the Center for Information Security, which are preconfigured to meet internationally recognized secure config...
Join the Azure Gov DC Meetup July 25: IT Governance for Cloud – Gov Best Practices
One of the biggest concerns slowing down government digital transformation is the lack of effective IT governance. Unresolved concerns including privacy, security and organizational silos limiting data sharing and analysis continue to pose challenges for agencies. To discuss ways to overcome these challenges, we invite you to RSVP and join us for the Microsoft Azure Government DC Meetup, IT Governance for Cloud - Gov Best Practices, on Wednesday, July 25 from 6 – 8:30 p.m. at 1776 Crystal City, Virginia.* During this Meetup you’ll hear from industry-leading experts who will share insights and strategies on ac...
New services and Azure Government marketplace partners
This summer we’re continuing to bring new services into Azure Government to support the innovation happening in the public sector. We would like to announce the following new services, with more coming soon: Azure Media Services is now generally available in Azure Government. Media Services makes it easy to use high-definition video encoding and streaming services to reach your audiences on today’s most popular devices. Media Services also enables you to extract richer metadata and improve accessibility, distribution, and scalability —all while protecting your content Media Services is based on REST APIs that...
Azure Security Center Preview now available in Azure Government
While cyber threats affect every organization and every individual, governments face unique challenges. The recent Executive Order on Strengthening the Cybersecurity of Federal Networks and Infrastructure represents a key example of the growing pressure on government agencies to increase their efforts around protecting highly sensitive data and systems. To help our customers address their security challenges, we are announcing the preview of Azure Security Center for Azure Government. Security Center delivers unified security management for hybrid cloud workloads, with continuous monitoring as well as security...