Microsoft has announced the forthcoming release of Office 365 Government Secret, the latest US Government cloud environment that supports Impact Level 6 (IL6), to offer assistance with secure and compliant productivity and collaboration resources, after Azure Government Secret and Top Secret clouds.
The Redmond tech giant"s newest tool is currently under government review pending accreditation, and targeting availability beginning in the second half of 2022. This resource has been developed to support the US Federal Civilian, Department of Defense (DoD), Intelligence Community (IC), and US government partners working within the Secret enclave with Microsoft"s software as a service (SaaS) capabilities.
Commenting on cloud productivity and collaboration, Microsoft stated:
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.
[...] 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.
This US Government cloud environment offers a "secure and trusted infrastructure" to assist the mission-critical workload shift from on-premises to the cloud. In addition, it will run the latest Office 365 Government productivity, security, compliance, and collaboration applications.
The company suggests that customers should engage with its onboarding teams to be prepared when the new resource is authorized for use if they plan on deploying Office 365 Secret environment. To learn more, customers can contact their internal organizational mission partners and their Microsoft account team.