Microsoft has announced new services for certification scope in Microsoft Azure Government. The company has rolled out eight new tools to its government-oriented version of the Azure cloud. All of the new services have Joint Authorization Board (JAB) approval for Azure Government’s P-ATO at the High Impact Level.
In a blog post, Microsoft says the total number of FedRAMP High baseline services is now at 26. As a comparison, cloud rival Amazon Web Service GovCloud has 20 FedRAMP certified services.
Because of the authorization approval, the services can be used by Federal and local governments, and the DoD. Customers creating solutions for Azure Government with a need for compliance can use the new services.
Microsoft describes the new services in its blog:
- Azure Resource Manager – Azure Resource Manager (ARM) enables you to repeatedly deploy your app and have confidence your resources are deployed in a consistent state.
- Automation – Azure Automation uses Windows PowerShell scripts and workflows – known as runbooks – to handle the creation, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of Azure resources and third-party applications.
- Azure Batch – Azure Batch makes it easy to run large-scale parallel and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads in Azure.
- Log Analytics – Log Analytics is a service in Operations Management Suite that helps you collect and analyze data generated by resources in your cloud and on-premises environments.
- Azure Media Services – Azure Media Services offers broadcast-quality video streaming services to reach larger audiences on today’s most popular mobile devices.
- Policy Administration Service/RBAC – Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) enables fine-grained access management for Azure. Using RBAC, you can grant only the amount of access that users need to perform their jobs.
- Redis Cache – Redis Cache gives you access to a secure, dedicated cache for your Azure application usage. It leverages the low-latency, high-throughput capabilities of the Redis engine.
- Scheduler – Azure Scheduler lets you invoke actions that call HTTP/S endpoints or post messages to a storage queue on any schedule.
New Azure Government Services
With the Azure Resource Manager, customers can create a template that houses app infrastructure and dependencies. Microsoft explains that the template is stable enough to be used in test, staging, and production versions of the app. Among the abilities for the template include seeing linked resources, tags for resources, actionable resources, and ARM logs for audits.
The Azure Automation feature has also been added to Government. Automation runbooks work with Web Apps in Azure App Service, Azure Virtual Machines (Windows or Linux), Azure Storage, Azure SQL Database, and any service that offers public Internet APIs.
