While the new dedicated government community cloud does not have an official launch date yet, once available, it will exclusively host data storage, applications and infrastructure for federal, state, local and tribal governments. Everything stored in the Windows Azure U.S. Government Cloud will be hosted in the continental U.S. and managed by screened U.S. citizens or legal foreign residents, according to Susie Adams, CTO of federal government business for Microsoft.
“Windows Azure really is not just for example, an infrastructure-as-a-service offering,” Adams said. “It’s actually a very well-rounded cloud platform that covers both infrastructure and platform as a service.”
Nearly two years ago, Microsoft launched a government community cloud for the Office 365 cloud service. The offering encompasses cloud support for its suite of applications like Exchange, email, calendaring and SharePoint.