The Silicon Review ^Asia

Recently, Microsoft announced that it will soon let government clients run its cloud technology on their private servers by integrating Azure Stack, its hybrid cloud platform, with Azure Government. The company is making efforts to attract more government clients and make Azure more appealing to local and federal agencies. Its clients can now easily protect sensitive data and classified information that needed to be kept in on-premise servers and be compliant with data regulations.

The integration will give a tough competition to Amazon Web Services, which had a head start due to its $600 million deal with the Central Intelligence Agency in 2013. Tom Keane, Microsoft Azure’s head of global infrastructure said, “ The new offering, which will be made available in mid-2018, is designed to appeal to governments and agencies with needs for on-premise servers, such as in a military operation or in an embassy abroad. Quite literally we’ve designed Azure Stack with the scenario of a submarine in mind.”

Microsoft, however, is trying to catch up with Amazon and both companies are trying their best to add services designed for government clients. Microsoft is aiming at expanding its reach into the high-security government cloud space and will launch two new Azure Secret regional instances. These facilities will exclusively serve the national security agencies and will be cleared to host files designated up to DoD Impact Level 6. Amazon too announced last fall that it offered a “secret region” designed especially for the needs of U.S. intelligence agencies.