Is Azure Government Right for Your Agency? Key Considerations and Features

If your organization uses Microsoft's Azure cloud and operates in the government sector, it may be a good candidate for Azure Government — a version of the Azure cloud designed specifically for government agencies.

But the key word there is may. Azure Government isn't necessarily the best solution for government agencies that want to use the cloud — and despite some misconceptions to the contrary, not all U.S. government agencies have to use Azure Government if they deploy workloads on Azure.

To help decide whether Azure Government is right for your organization, keep reading as we explain what Azure Government is, which unique features it offers, and when it does and doesn't make sense to use it.

What Is Azure Government?

Azure Government is a version of Microsoft's Azure public cloud computing platform designed to help streamline the management of sensitive government-related data and applications.

When you use Azure Government, you get access to almost all the same cloud services and features that you'd get from the general-purpose version of Azure (which is often called "Azure Commercial"). However, Azure Government offers some additional capabilities, including:

Related:Pros and Cons of Government IT Jobs

Benefits of Azure Government

The main benefit of Azure Government is that it provides security guarantees that are not available from the generic Azure Commercial cloud. This is because, as noted above, Azure Government provides access to U.S.-based data centers that are isolated from the rest of Azure's infrastructure and that are managed by U.S. persons.

As a result, using Azure Government can help organizations with strict security requirements mitigate certain types of risks. For instance, U.S. government agencies that seek to ensure that foreigners cannot access their data can use Azure Government to mitigate the risk that a non-U.S. employee of their cloud provider could access their information from within a cloud data center.

Related:Multicloud, DevSecOps, AI Pose Challenges for Federal Government

These security protections may also help meet compliance requirements in certain cases, such as those that require digital data to remain within the U.S.

Azure Government and Compliance

That said, it's important to understand that using Azure Government is not the only way to achieve high security and compliance standards in the U.S. government sector.

In fact, the generic Azure Commercial cloud provides almost all of the same cloud compliance guarantees and certifications as Azure Government — including those that cover compliance regulations central to the U.S. government sector, such as FedRAMP. This means that, in general, you don't need to use Azure Government to ensure that your cloud workloads comply with regulations like FedRAMP. In most cases, you can use the generic Azure cloud for this purpose.

However, the guarantee that Azure Government employees are screened U.S. persons may be useful in meeting certain compliance goals. For example, the U.S. government's Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) rules include requirements related to performing background checks on personnel who can access certain types of data. Since Azure Government guarantees that employees with inside access to cloud-based workloads have undergone screening, it may help meet this requirement. Azure Commercial doesn't, since it offers no guarantees about employee background or screening.

In short, although Azure Commercial and Azure Government both offer rigorous security and compliance controls, Azure Government provides a few extra features — above all, guarantees related to employees' national status and background screenings — that Azure Commercial lacks.

The Limitations of Azure Government

To a very large extent, you can run the same types of workloads on both Azure Commercial and Azure Government. However, there are some nuanced differences in feature availability between Azure Commercial and Azure Government.

For the most part, these differences are very minor. Azure Government doesn't support Azure Active Directory B2C, for example — although it supports all other Azure Active Directory capabilities. Likewise, although Azure Migrate features are virtually identical on both platforms, features like containerizing ASP.NET apps and deploying them as Windows containers on Azure Kubernetes Service are not supported on Azure Government.

These differences are not likely to affect most organizations, but they may be an issue if you need to support very specific use cases, and Azure Government happens to lack a certain feature you require.

Azure Government Costs

Note, too, that Azure Government has a cost premium. The extra pricing varies between specific cloud services, but typically, an organization will pay 10% or 15% more on Azure Government than it would for the same type of service or resource on Azure Commercial.

So, unless you actually need an Azure Government feature, it's wasteful from the perspective of cloud cost optimization to use it.

Azure Government for Non-U.S. Organizations

A final important fact to understand about Azure Government is that it's designed for government agencies based in the U.S. (including those at the state and local level, in addition to federal agencies).

If you operate in a different country, Azure Government typically won't offer any special benefits for you — although Azure may offer other cloud services designed to help meet your security and compliance needs.

So, Who Should Use Azure Government?

Not every U.S. government agency needs to use Azure Government to remain compliant. In general, agencies should only use Azure Government if they require one of the following:

If these specific requirements aren't important, agencies can typically run their workloads in the generic Azure Commercial cloud while still meeting their compliance goals. They'll save money to boot, given the lower cost of Azure Commercial.