Azure Government
Updates for building solutions across Microsoft's Clouds for Government
Latest posts
Veterans Affairs issues FedRAMP High ATO for Microsoft Azure Government
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the US government’s largest civilian agency, has issued a FedRAMP High Authority to Operate (ATO) for Microsoft Azure Government. This validates that the Microsoft Azure Government cloud meets all security and compliance standards necessary to handle VA’s most sensitive data, to include PII and PHI workloads. The FedRAMP High ATO for Azure Government is a critical next step as the VA readies to leverage the cloud to modernize services for veterans around the world. The High compliance standard coverage of sensitive data including PII and PHI along with VA’s high-speed d...
Getting Started with Storage in Azure Government
Azure Government uses the same underlying technologies as commercial Azure, enabling you to use the development tools you’re already familiar with. However, Azure Government provides a physical and network-isolated instance of Azure which results in a higher level of compliance and security. As a result of this, we use different physical endpoints for our services such as Azure Storage. Getting started with Storage on Azure Government is quite easy. The Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer has quickly become one of the most popular tools for working with Azure Storage. It is cross-platform and free. We are happy to ...
Building a solution on Azure Government Part III: Power BI
Now that we’ve done our text analysis using HDInsight, let’s add some high-quality visualizations using Power BI for Azure Government. Let’s first log into Power BI for Azure Gov. Here we are presented with our initial options. Let’s connect to a database by clicking the “Get” button in the “Database” tile: In the next screen, we can see that we have an option for Spark on Azure HDInsight: Once we select Spark, we need to specify the server we want to connect to (we can get this value directly from the URL for the HDInsight cluster in the Azure Government portal): We use the credentials we setup during p...
Join us March 29 in DC: Learn How to Apply Cognitive Services to Your Agency’s Mission
Offering myriad possibilities, cognitive services teach computers to understand the world as humans do. This emerging technology can provide exciting and powerful capabilities for government agencies to better meet their unique missions and improve citizen services and engagement. To hear how cognitive services can advance government, RSVP and join the Microsoft Azure Government DC user community for our next Meetup, Learning How to Apply Cognitive Services to Your Agency's Mission, on Wednesday, March 29 from 6 – 8:30 p.m. at 1776 in Washington, DC. This month, we are excited to have Justin "Doc" Herm...
Building a solution on Azure Government Part II: HDInsight
In the previous post I went over how to use Cognitive services to get a document translated, let’s do some simple text analytics on the document. Specifically, we’ll get some simple word counts so we can see how frequently the key words are used. We can easily provision HDInsight clusters in the Microsoft Azure Government portal. The screen shot below shows a 4-node Spark cluster provisioned on Linux. When an HDInsight cluster is provisioned, an Azure storage account is provisioned for the underlying storage. Let’s connect to the storage with the Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer so that we can upload our tran...
Building a solution on Azure Government Part I: Cognitive Services
The Microsoft Azure Government platform is rapidly innovating with new services being introduced all the time. We have recently announced HDInsight and Power BI as GA on Azure Government. These data-centric services unlock a world of possibilities for your organization to process massive amount of data. In this developer-centric walk-through, I will show you how you can leverage Azure Government to implement a Government-focused scenario. In this scenario, we will translate a Chinese document to English and then perform data analytics and visualizations on that translation. This walk-through will consist of 3 ma...
Azure HDInsight and Power BI now available in Azure Government
As announced in Tom Keane’s data launch announcement, we are pleased to bring the general availability of Azure HDInsight on Linux in Microsoft Azure Government, as well as, Power BI US Government with Office 365 US Government Community subscriptions. HDInsight Azure HDInsight deploys and provisions clusters from the Apache Hadoop ecosystem (including Spark, Storm, Hbase) in the cloud, providing a software framework designed to manage, analyze, and report on big data. To see how HDInsight on Linux integrates into Government-specific data solutions, check out the demo here. HDInsight Premium is currently in Previ...
Microsoft Tech Summit DC to feature government-focused sessions – March 6-7
Are you headed to the Microsoft Tech Summit March 6-7 in Washington, DC? If so, be sure to connect with the Azure Government Engineering team. Among the more than 50 technical training sessions, we are hosting 14 government-specific sessions starting with a can’t-miss “What’s New in Azure Government Cloud” by Tom Keane, General Manager, Microsoft Azure, 11:30 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., in the Rotunda Room following the keynote. Check out all the government-focused sessions below and be sure to stop by the Azure Government booth to visit us in the sponsor pavilion. We look forward seeing you at the summit! #MSTechS...
A former CJIS ISO perspective: Microsoft’s commitment to law enforcement from top to bottom
“I have worked with hundreds of vendors in my twelve years as CJIS ISO in Texas, and never have I found any vendor more committed to law enforcement.” Alan Ferretti, Former CJIS ISO in Texas Alan Ferretti, former Texas CJIS Information Security Officer (ISO), and I have been working together for nearly five years. He recently retired and wanted to provide his perspective on being a former CJIS ISO and working with Microsoft. Alan Ferretti As a State CJIS ISO, you never know what you’ll be dealing with when the phone rings. Sometimes it might be an auditor with a disabled vehicle up in the Panhandle, or it may ...