Microsoft is pleased to announce the opening of the Preview of our new Azure Government Department of Defense (DoD) regions. As previously announced by Jason Zander, Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Azure, these regions offer a comprehensive cloud that is DoD information Impact Level 5-ready for infrastructure, platform, and productivity services. Microsoft is the only hyperscale cloud provider to provide this level of support to the DoD as we continue to demonstrate our commitment to invest in the most trusted, comprehensive cloud for government. This is reflected in our announcement yesterday by Tom Keane, general manager, Microsoft, who announced that Azure Government has grown three times in 2016 and has added 75 new capabilities in the last 90 days alone!

Our goal with this Preview is to provide DoD customers with the opportunity to gain early access to these DoD regions and get hands-on exposure to our platform and infrastructure services. Most importantly, we want our DoD customers to provide feedback to our engineering teams as we close in on making these regions generally available to the DoD community in early 2017.

In order to gain access to the Azure DoD regions, customers must complete a pre-qualification process for verifying their organization and intended use of the Azure DoD environment. After successful completion of the pre-qualification process, Microsoft will provide the organizational applicant with further instructions for creating a subscription, accessing the environment and providing role-based access control to other members of the organization. If you represent a DoD entity interested in previewing our DoD regions, please contact your Microsoft sales team or contact us at AzureGovtDoDPreview@microsoft.com to begin this validation process.

Please continue to watch this blog over the coming weeks for updates on the availability of the Azure Government DoD regions, service announcements and frequently asked questions from customers and partners. We look forward to continuing to partner with the DoD to modernize and innovate in support of the warfighter using the Microsoft cloud.

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.