Azure Government has the broadest compliance certifications of any cloud provider on the market!

Azure for State and Local Government 

Azure government cloud for local government offers a great opportunity for leaders to do more with their technology budgets and fuel innovation. Whether the goal is to provide citizens with more efficient government services, empower government employees with data driven collaboration tools, or enhance government security and compliance initiatives, Azure Government Cloud can help achieve this. 

As we know, the purpose of local governments is to serve its communities and citizens. Thus, the vital services that governments provide need reliable and flexible solutions. Azure Government services make all this possible with simplified management and access to cloud compute, storage, and applications. By moving workloads to Azure Government Cloud, local governments have opportunity to modernize infrastructure, predict IT costs more efficiently, and consolidate workloads. 

Why are governments not moving to the cloud?

Unfortunately, government cloud adoption has been slow with research from a 2021 survey on Government Cloud Adoption revealing that up to 80% of government entities still rely on on-premise IT hardware for critical services. This slow rate of cloud adoption is severely hindered by legacy infrastructure due to the demands and skill requirements of upgrading infrastructure. 

Is Azure Government secure?

As more government agencies become interested in cloud services, they can be certain that Microsoft Azure Government provides the compliance and security they need. Azure Government is a dedicated cloud just for government agencies built to support mission-critical workloads under various U.S. government regulations and requirements. Microsoft Azure Government cloud maintains compliance with FedRAMP High, DoD IL2-5, CJIS, IRS 1075, NIST 800-171, and more. In fact, Azure Government has the broadest compliance certifications of any cloud provider on the market!

Ransomware on the Rise

Since 2016, more than 400 cities have been exposed by ransomware attacks. These events have crippled government services and caused significant disruption during these attacks. Azure Government is designed to protect the widest range of enterprise services and applications of any cloud disaster recovery provider. In fact, Azure Site Recovery allows for the failover of an entire data center in a matter of hours instead of weeks or even months! Azure Government’s cloud-based backup and site recovery services provide reliable protection of data and services and ensures business continuity when it is needed most. Azure Government backup and disaster recovery solutions are a cost-effective way to ensure government agencies are prepared for unexpected events. These solutions are built for the strictest security and compliance requirements of U.S. Government. Azure Government provides true geographic redundancy by replicating data in multiple datacenters located more than 500 miles apart and all data, applications, and hardware reside in the continental United States, and are managed exclusively by U.S. screened personnel.

Government Cloud in Action: Enabling Secure and Modern Community Services

Ultimately, citizens today expect a positive user experience and speed of access when utilizing government services. Azure Government has been allowing cities to create innovative citizen service experiences that enable citizens to engage the government on their own and on the device of their choice. With Azure Government, cities are providing members of the community with secure, accessible ways to interact with the government while increasing the efficiency of service offerings. With security-focused identity technologies, citizens can securely access personal records and transaction history. 

Citizen services such as websites and apps help citizens engage on their terms. However, governments must consider ensuring security and optimizing the performance of these services. For example, with Azure Government, agencies can quickly build, deploy, and scale enterprise-grade web, mobile, and API apps running on any platform using Azure App Service. This is a fully managed platform, which means that Azure handles the infrastructure maintenance. Enabling single sign-on can simplify user access to cloud applications from any device using Azure Active Directory, and creates a unified approach to identity for citizens and staff. Further, Multi-Factor Authentication can be added for an additional level of verification. These services protect government organizations and mitigate potential threats with security monitoring, alerts, and machine learning reports that identify inconsistent access patterns. Lastly, citizen engagement can become more effective by adopting the use of Azure Bot Service which can quickly build a chatbot capable of answering citizen questions and engage in a conversation. This can greatly reduce the need for call center staffing. Azure Cognitive Services can even give bots intelligence. Using cognitive services, bots can not only have conversations, but they can also recognize a user in photos, make smart recommendations, translate languages, increase accessibility, and more.

Why Azure Government?

With the power of Azure Government, agencies can unlock innovation with powerful data and analysis services to rapidly build intelligent solutions at scale. These solutions enable productivity within a trusted cloud exclusive to government, with world class security and advanced threat protection services. Azure Government meets all critical compliance standards and exceeds U.S. Government regulatory requirements. Accelerate development with an open platform and unified tools and services in a flexible and secure environment.