For years now, Microsoft Corporation has created special versions of the Azure cloud which allows the United States' government agencies to compute its platforms which possesses all the required certifications to allow federal, state and local agencies to use its services.

At present, the American multinational technology company is expanding its service with the introduction of the new versions of Azure and Office 365 for the Department of Defense (DoD) which will run in two new committed regions where they are physically inaccessible from the other platforms of Azure.

According to Microsoft, the South West and South Central regions of the United States will be also connected to the Department of Defense through the use of a private Azure Express Route connection.

The Microsoft's cloud was previously certified to handle information for up to the Department of Defense Impact Level 4 which is controlled but uncategorized data, like export controlled information, privacy information and protected health information. Microsoft said that it is currently on the process of applying for the DoD Impact Level 5 for both Office 365 and Azure in the South West and South Central regions. Impact Level 5 is still mostly unclassified data, but, compared to Impact Level 4, it already includes unclassified National Security Systems data, among other things.)

As per the company's government customers, Julia White, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President for Cloud Marketing, said in an interview that what she is seeing is that "they all now have a cloud strategy in place - which is an evolution from just a few years ago."

From the previous years, the conversations still centered around what the cloud really was and what it could do for these agencies. "Now they are are having the more interesting conversations," White said.

According to her, many of the government agencies are currently considering the moving of their productivity suites online. And with Office 365, the company can propose with them an answer which most of their workers are already familiar with.

At present, Microsoft has achieved most of the standard certifications allowing most government agencies to use the company's cloud services (think HIPAA, FedRAMP, etc.).