Microsoft just rolled out its most secure Microsoft 365 version yet
The tech giant thinks the US Government is ready for cloud
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Microsoft Office 365Government Secret Cloud, a secure environment for the company’s flagshipcollaboration tool, is now generally available.
In anannouncementon theMicrosoft365 (M365) Blog, Microsoft claimed that the release, which offers especially secure variants ofemail clientsExchange and Outlook alongside itsoffice softwaresuite, brings a level of security and compliance to its productivity tools suitable for government use.
The clearest application of the new environment for M365 is to keep data secure. Microsoft admits that the bulk of government data is stored via on-prem servers, but believes its latest release means this work can now move exclusively tocloud storagevia itssoftware as a service.
Productivity tools in government
M365 is now the only set of businessproductivity toolsto offer “anImpact Level 6 (IL6)environment”, a data handling protocol designed by the Department of Defense’s Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), to protect cloud-stored data in the hands of government agencies all the way “up to the SECRET level”.
This allows M365 Government Secret Cloud to bring “cloud based collaboration and communication” to classified environments which, according to Microsoft, is another first.
Government IT spending is set for a major rise>The US Army is now a Google Workspace customer>We’ve also listed the best hybrid working tech right now
The company can feel confident in making that claim, with M365’s new capabilities bolstering the efforts of Azure Government Secret and Top Secret, “air-gapped” regions of its cloud infrastructure offering tightened security and increased data visibility.
AnnouncingAzure Government Top Secretin August 2021, Microsoft pitched the unique Azure regions to “mission leaders”, claiming that it would enable them to draw insights from data faster and offer “unified cybersecurity capabilities” to protect the nation’s most critical data.
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Luke Hughes holds the role of Staff Writer at TechRadar Pro, producing news, features and deals content across topics ranging from computing to cloud services, cybersecurity, data privacy and business software.
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