Microsoft Planning Office 365 Government Secret coming this year

Microsoft’s new Office 365 Government Secret provides Impact Level 6 (IL6) employment support for US government agencies.

Microsoft this week announced Office 365 Government Secret, a new version of its cloud productivity suite . In a blog post, the company describes the product as a software-as-a-service that provides custom functionality for US federal agencies. It will be available in mid-2022, although it will likely start as a preview.

“Office 365 Government Secret currently under government review pending accreditation and targeted availability from mid-2022″† This environment is built to support the US Federal Civilian, Department of Defense (DoD), Intelligence Community (IC), and US government partners working within the secret enclave with our best-in-class Software as a Service (SaaS) capabilities .”

The big difference here with regular Office 365 is of course compliance and security specifically for use in government agencies. For example, Office 365 Government Secret supports Il6 work (Impact Level 6).

This means classified/secret data can be stored without being compromised. In addition, IL6 support allows the data to be “processed only in a federal government private/community or community cloud DoD.”

Functions

Microsoft also uses a special data center infrastructure to process and store government data. The company describes this as “standalone”, so it’s closed and specific to Government Secret customers. IL6 workloads on Office 365 are separate from non-DoD data.

In addition, government agencies have access to Microsoft ExpressRoute, a private Internet solution.

“Governments face many challenges in today’s globally connected workspaces, including increasing employee engagement and productivity with the latest tools, securing and managing sensitive data, and managing multiple applications, devices and workloads,” Microsoft adds.

Office 365 Government Secret will be placed alongside the company’s existing Government Secret products, including Azure Top Secret and Government Secret in the cloud.

source: winbuzzer