Azure Government
Updates for building solutions across Microsoft's Clouds for Government
Latest posts
Join us: DC Azure Gov Meetup on Hybrid Cloud with ExpressRoute – Dec. 14
Hybrid is not a trend or a buzz word, it is a reality that every enterprise is facing today. Furthermore, real hybrid does not mean infrastructure alone. It applies to the entire stack from SaaS-based productivity services to PaaS and of course IaaS. It means consistency across on-premises and the cloud. A key part of Microsoft’s Hybrid story for government is ExpressRoute which will be the focus of our next DC Azure Government Meetup Wednesday, Dec. 14 from 6 – 8:30 p.m. at 1776 in Washington, DC. We are fortunate to have James Walters, director of Azure EcoSystem Networking for Microsoft Azure Government j...
Azure QuickStart Templates for Azure Government
With the release of Azure Resource Manager on Microsoft Azure Government (MAG), users are now able to provision and deploy applications using declarative templates. A full listing of publicly contributed templates can be found at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/templates/ . How to use QuickStart Templates in MAG Many of the contributed templates in our Github repo https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates will work on MAG without modification. Deploy options are described below. Templates that don’t follow the best practices outlined in our Github repo typically won’t run for a coup...
Azure Import / Export – Working with FIPS and other security controls
I was recently working with one of our government customers that wanted to make use of a newer offering: Azure Import/Export. Now I know what you’re saying… “Chase, this has been out since 2014.” True, this isn’t a new service to Azure, but it was recently accredited and made generally available to the Azure Government space. If you aren’t familiar with the service, it’s an easy way to transfer large amounts of data from the outside world into Azure storage. There is a very similar offering for Office 365 as well (think PSTs). The tool itself is a command line interface that copies data to a BitLocker encrypted ...
Solution Template support now available in Azure Government Marketplace
Last month we announced Azure Marketplace availability in Azure Government, which included individual VM publishing capabilities. Today we’re pleased to announce that solution templates are now supported in the Azure Government Marketplace portal. Solution templates allow you to bundle multiple Azure services and images into a template that enables customers to deploy all solutions at once, saving time and resources. You can now deploy the below solutions through templates directly via the Marketplace UI, with additional solution templates being added regularly. Additional Resources: We w...
Azure Disk Encryption availability for Azure Government cloud customers
Today, we announce the general availability of Azure disk encryption for Windows and Linux IaaS VMs in Azure Government cloud regions. With this announcement, Azure disk encryption for Windows and Linux IaaS Standard tier VMs (Std A, D, DS, G, GS etc series) is now generally available in all Azure Gov cloud regions to enable customers to protect the OS and data disk at rest using industry standard encryption technology. Azure Disk Encryption is a capability that lets you encrypt your Windows and Linux IaaS VM disks. Azure Disk Encryption leverages the industry standard BitLocker feature of Windows and the DM-Cry...
Azure Government Marketplace Loves Open Source and Bitnami
Azure Government is excited to expand our partnership with Bitnami via the Azure Government Marketplace beyond the initial offering in Image Gallery. We are happy to announce the first wave of open source images published by Bitnami to the Azure Government marketplace. The first wave of free open source and Bring Your Own License (BYOL) licenses includes eXo Platform Enterprise, ReportServer Enterprise, Moodle, Gitlab, Code Dx, LAMP, Drupal, WordPress, Open edX. Bitnami makes it incredibly easy to deploy apps with native installers, as virtual machines in the cloud. Bitnami has over a hundred application...
Azure Government Cloud expands P-ATO scope with addition of five new offerings
We are pleased to announce that Azure’s Government Cloud has expanded its FedRAMP Provisional Authorization to Operate (P-ATO) with the addition of five new offerings. Service Bus, Notification Hubs, Site Recovery, StorSimple, and Backup have all received Joint Authorization Board (JAB) approval for addition to Azure Government’s P-ATO at the High Impact Level. With the addition of these five offerings, the total number of Azure Government offerings that meet the FedRAMP High baseline grows to 18. About our new offerings: Azure Service Bus: Provides cloud-enabled communication with enterprise messaging and rel...
Log Analytics: How Operational Management Suite keeps customers safe and secure on Azure
This is my last post in this series where we have been talking about the Operational Management Suite (OMS) within Azure Government and how it can make customers feel safe & secure. In the previous posts we focused on the Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, and Azure Automation services that help make up the suite. Now I want to spend some time and talk about my favorite of the services, which is Log Analytics. This is not to say that the other three services are not important or exciting, it is just that I feel that Azure Government customers can see much more value from Log Analytics and the information t...
Automation Runbooks & DSC: How Operational Management Suite keeps Customers Safe & Secure in Azure
In my last post, I talked about the second of the two services within the Operational Management Suit (OMS) that focuses on Backup & Recovery of your On-Prem or Cloud related infrastructure. However, this is only one piece of the operational management footprint that Public Sector customers' IT departments need to keep their applications and infrastructure safe, secure, and most importantly, functioning. The third service within OMS that I want to talk about now is Azure Automation, which you can think of as a service that will manage frequent, time-consuming, and error-prone management tasks. Automation Ru...