Implementing Microsoft Azure in the US federal government

The US federal government is one of the world’s largest Microsoft Azure customers. I recently left my role as a Secure Infrastructure Field Engineer with Microsoft and now support the US Department of State’s cloud modernization and infrastructure modernization, including moving devices and trying to shift workloads to align with Microsoft 365 and Azure. Working with federal agencies, I have seen the ways that the federal government is adopting cloud and the importance of planning, strategy, and skillsets.

The implementation process in federal agencies has been very challenging overall. Every agency has its own kind of requirements, and they can differ widely. For Department of State, we are working to fill in gaps between technologies. The technological know-how is often so high-level that we have to work with the government to help leaders understand how the technology works and how it could improve productivity compared with previous ways of doing things. Microsoft 365, Teams, and SharePoint Online are very helpful for Department of State to support information management, collaboration, and internal processes. As a solution architect, my goal is to figure out how to centralize administration—including remote administration—and work with both Infrastructure as a Service and on-prem infrastructure.

What Azure services do federal agencies use? The answer depends on the agency.