Back in January, Microsoft announced the general availability of Office 365 Government Secret cloud services for members of the US government, including the Department of Defense. Today, it was revealed that the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) has started rolling out this new secure version of Microsoft 365 to its employees, most of whom work in the Pentagon.
The Federal News Network site says that the Defense Information Systems Agency has been testing Microsoft"s service, which the agency calls DOD365-Secret, since January. Now it will be used by a lot more DoD members as it rolls out over the next several weeks over its classified IT networks.
In a chat with Danielle Metz, the chief information officer for the OSD, she reveals that those workers had to collaborate in the past by using some unnamed "old school chat services". This new DOD365-Secret service should solve many problems:
Effectively what this does is it brings everybody together — we’re all on Teams and getting the same collaborative experience where we’re able to do chat, we’re able to do video, we’re able to collaborate on documents all at the same time, we’re able to store it in a cloud-based environment. None of that exists right now on the classified side, but we are at the precipice of having all of this at our fingertips.
Back in January, Microsoft said that Office 365 Secret would "run the latest enterprise-grade" security. It added:
With highly sensitive data, it is vital to ensure data is secure and controlled across multiple applications, devices, and workloads. We worked closely with our government partners to develop a secure and trusted infrastructure to aid this mission-critical workload shift from on-premises to the cloud.
There"s naturally no word on how much the Department of Defense has paid Microsoft to deploy this version of Microsoft 365.