Redmond hopes to lure Uncle Sam’s spy agencies, military away from Amazon
Microsoft has set up two new Azure cloud regions in the US – dubbed Azure Government Secret regions – to store data involving American national security. The services are in private preview, and are pending official government accreditation.
The Windows giant hopes the pair of regions will obtain a Dept of Defense Impact Level 6 badge, which would allow it to store and process information classified as secret. It is also looking for Intelligence Community Directive (ICD 503) accreditation.
Each region consists of at least two availability zones, and each availability zone lives on its own individual server farm.
The Azure Government Secret data centers are so secret Microsoft doesn’t disclose their location, only stating on Thursday that they are located more than 500 miles apart.
The new regions join Microsoft’s six existing Azure Government regions, which have now been certified as IL5, which means they are suitable for controlled but unclassified information.
“With our focus on innovating to meet the needs of our mission-critical customers, we continue to provide more PaaS features and services to the DoD at IL5 than any other cloud provider,” said Lily Kim, general manager for Azure.
