Microsoft announces the establishment of a "secret" cloud feature and its closure on Amazon

Microsoft officials announced Tuesday that the company had reached the security levels required to host secret WE. military and intelligence data on its computer network, Azure, said it was on track to host "top secret" information soon. These developments have put the IT giant in closer competition with its rival in the cloud, Amazon, to process the most sensitive and important information from the government and perhaps also fight for the $ 10 billion deal. dollars on the coveted Pentagon cloud. JEDI.

Microsoft offers a variety of services to Azure customers, enabling them to use their data in the cloud, from machine learning to artificial intelligence and analytics, in addition to multimedia tools and integration with devices Internet of Things.

In a few months, government agencies and workers could manage their secret data via these applications.

"We are taking our Azure public cloud and sending our FedRamp coverage to 50 of these services," said Julia White, vice president of Microsoft Azure, referring to the cybersecurity framework for cloud hosting for the government. "By the end of the calendar year, these 50 services will be FedRamp certified."

Competition for government-wide cloud contracts is a big step forward for Microsoft, which remains publicly recognized by its Windows operating system and popular applications, such as Word, running on laptops and PCs. The emergence of cloud-based services, especially free services like Google Docs, was a big challenge for all things Microsoft.

Mr. White believes that Microsoft is well positioned to take advantage of the current situation of IT, companies and agencies wishing to store more information in the cloud, but with many data of various formats still blocked in local machines.

The Internet of Things, or IOT, is made up of more and more devices that send data to the cloud but also store and use it. It is a world of machines with many innate capabilities and more memory, or even rudimentary artificial intelligence, because of advances in the miniaturization of computer components.

"IOT matures, evolves. [Devices] become much more sophisticated, they are able to run real applications on these small devices, "said White.

These developments result in extremely complex "hybrid" environments, with much data stored on old computers and data centers, a lot of additional data transported to the public cloud, and many smart devices storing and distributing data. The challenge is to provide the same level of service, the same applications and cool programs to customers who store more of their data in such different places, White said. "We chose this hybrid approach," she says, with services that can run on local machines as well as in the cloud. They even sell huge boxes of data, like digital treasure chests, that can carry data from one place to another.

Amazon is still a much larger cloud provider than Microsoft, with about four times the turnover, although this percentage is decreasing. They also have a huge community of developers who are constantly developing new programs and services to experiment and play with the data.

Amazon is increasingly concerned about the national security community. Last November, a member of the military accidentally left around 100 GB classified data on the public face AWS portal. This was a user error, not a piracy or security breach unknown to Amazon. But this still poses a problem for Amazon, who assigns responsibility for control and management to the customer, whether operators or developers whose specialty is not managing a complex cloud environment.

Microsoft and Google have put in place additional processes to protect their cloud from user errors. "As long as you have control over the environment you created in Azure, a virtual machine can only be enabled if it has this set of security features … even things like" who can access that type of application "can be preconfigured with these policies."

But Google announced Monday that it would pull out of competition, citing its inability to meet the required security levels and its inability to be "assured that this would match our will". HAVE Principles, "according to a Google spokesperson.

Google's abdication makes Amazon and Microsoft the two most likely candidates for the JEDI Contract.