Announcing Office 365 Government Secret cloud to help secure classified data

Since announcing the general availability of Azure Government Secret and Top Secret clouds, our mission has been to support all US government agencies, departments, municipalities, and public sector employees with the most advanced, secure, and compliant productivity and collaboration tools. Today, we’re excited to announce the upcoming launch of a new US Government cloud environment: Office 365 Government Secret which is currently in government review pending accreditation and targeting availability starting early 2023. 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.

With the launch of this new environment supporting Impact Level 6 (IL6), we’re adding to the comprehensive set of Office 365 Government cloud offerings to help meet the full spectrum of government data needs.

Driving mission resiliency with cloud productivity and collaboration

Governments face many challenges in today’s globally connected workspaces, including increasing employee engagement and productivity with the latest tools, securing and controlling sensitive data, and managing multiple applications, devices, and workloads. When governments factor in the increasing demands on security and the importance of protecting highly sensitive workloads across an expansive network of government agencies and partners, it becomes increasingly important to provide government employees with secure, productive, and efficient cloud options to help them achieve their missions.

To support the mission-critical workload shift from on-premises to the cloud, it requires us to work closely with the government to provide a secure and trusted infrastructure. This new environment will run the latest enterprise-grade Office 365 Government productivity, security, compliance, and collaboration applications. We have a comprehensive approach to build, test, onboard, and audit our products to be compliant with government regulations, which will help ensure security and compliance for the environments. We work to drive efficiencies internally and with government regulatory bodies to help improve the timeliness of products to market. With this shift to the secure cloud, it’s critical that we work closely with government agencies and partners on their resiliency needs in enabling the innovative enterprise-grade tools and capabilities that will support their missions.

Start your deployment plan now to prepare for the new cloud opportunities

If you plan to deploy Office 365 Secret environment, Microsoft highly encourages customers to engage with our onboarding teams right away to be prepared for when the environment is authorized for use. This includes working with different support groups (like Microsoft FastTrack, Microsoft Consulting Services, and deployment partners) to plan out remediation activities for identity, networks, devices, on-premises server upgrades, and a pilot plan for migrations. Developing these plans early on will help ensure unique environment transition challenges can be addressed and mitigated before a more comprehensive rollout. If you have any questions or would like help on these next steps, please reach out to your internal organizational mission partners and your Microsoft account team today.