Azure Government
Updates for building solutions across Microsoft's Clouds for Government
Latest posts
Introducing the Azure Environment Selector Visual Studio extension
Visual Studio has many tools that enable developers to easily interact with Azure. These are tools like the Cloud Explorer for Visual Studio 2017, Visual Studio Server Explorer, the main Visual Studio login, and even being able to right-click in the Visual Studio Solution Explorer to deploy a web project to Azure. However, by default, these tools connect directly to the Azure commercial cloud. What about Azure Government developers? In the Azure Government documentation, we show how you can place an Azure Active Directory configuration file in a directory that enables Visual Studio to point to Azure Governmen...
The CJIS Security Policy – Analyzing the 13 Policy Areas: Part II
Better than a sleeping pill or a riveting read? In our last blog post, Alan Ferretti, CJIS Security Analyst and Subject Matter Expert of the CJIS ACE Division at Diverse Computing, and I covered the first four sections of the CJIS Security Policy. We will continue with Section 5 and its thirteen Policy areas and how they impact you and your agency. You will find out why it is called the Policy and Implementation Section for good reason. The first Policy area addresses Information Exchange agreements. The policies for information exchange are designed to prevent unauthorized disclosure, alteration or misuse. Th...
Data security Q&A with John Molesky, Azure Security Engineering
In this post, we interviewed Azure Program Manager, John Molesky, from the Cloud Health and Security Engineering team with commonly asked questions regarding data security. For many customers, moving to the cloud means a change in processes to manage data, including data destruction and spillage. John's answers help address those concerns. 1. How can customers secure access to storage accounts? Azure offers a few ways to secure access to storage accounts. When a storage account is created, Azure generates 512-bit storage access keys, which, when combined with the storage account name, can be used to access the...
Microsoft Azure IaaS Architecture Best Practices for ARM
How to design and build an enterprise infrastructure in Azure using the Azure Resource Manager portal Getting started in Azure is easy to do, and you can have production workloads running in the cloud in very little time. However, there are some essential aspects of the Azure platform that require some forethought and planning. While it is easy to get up and running quickly, without the necessary planning in some areas, you could find it necessary to rebuild these workloads later if you haven’t fully considered the bigger picture—from an enterprise perspective. Let’s avoid the necessity of having to redeploy or r...
The CJIS Security Policy – Analyzing the 13 Policy Areas: Part I
Better than a sleeping pill or a riveting read? Recently Alan Ferretti and I were talking about compliance for agencies and lamented on the fact that most people malign the CJIS Security Policy as a good cure for insomnia. It seems you can’t attend a conference where a speaker doesn’t make a joke about it. When in fact, the Policy is important to all law enforcement practitioners and forms the basis for the protection of Criminal Justice Information (CJI). Being compliant takes a commitment at all levels - from an agency, to the technical staff that supports them, out to the vendors with their essential product...
Setting up VNET integration in App Services using Powershell
One of the capabilities in the Web Apps Service is placing your Azure resources in a non-internet routable network that you can control access to. These networks can be connected to your on-premise networks using VPN technologies. For example, with VNET integration you can enable access from your web app to resources running on a virtual machine in your Azure virtual network. It is important to note that this will not isolate your WebApp from the internet, but rather enable it and other resources to operate within the integrated VNET. We will be enabling the UI aspect of this feature in the upcoming months. In...
Microsoft Signs CJIS Information Agreements with Indiana and Iowa
Microsoft has signed agreements with 28 states – now over 50% of the states are covered representing 70% of U.S. sworn officers. Microsoft contractually committed to the applicable controls of the CJIS Security Policy by signing a CJIS Information Agreements with Indiana and Iowa. This commitment allows CJIS Systems Agencies to background check our employees with potential access to Criminal Justice Information (CJI), audit our controls to validate compliance, and allows law enforcement agencies the opportunity to deploy innovative solutions for camera technology, biometrics, jail/court/offender management, inve...
Announcing general availability of Publish to Web in Power BI Pro for Government
We are happy to announce the general availability of Publish to Web in Power BI Pro for Government. With Power BI Publish to Web, customers can now easily embed interactive Power BI visualizations online, such as in blog posts, websites, through emails or social media, on any device. They will also be able to easily edit, update, refresh or un-share your published visuals. For more details on how to use Publish to Web, view the documentation here. 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 ...
Announcing DSv2-Series and Fs-Series VMs in US Gov Virginia
We are happy to announce the general availability of DSv2-Series and Fs-Series (not to be confused with F-series) virtual machines in US Gov Virginia. DSv2-series and Fs-series VMs can use Premium Storage, which provides high-performance, low-latency storage for Input/Output intensive workloads. These VMs use solid-state drives (SSDs) to host a virtual machine’s disks and also provide a local SSD disk cache. For customers already utilizing DS-Series VMs in US Gov Virginia, DSv2 offers similar memory and disk, but offers more powerful CPUs which are based on 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2673 v3 (Haswell) processors and...