Microsoft on March 16 announced a Collaborative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) to assist the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Cloud Computing Program Office (CCPO) in developing a set of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) templates to build standard environments in Azure to accelerate Defense Department (DoD) cloud adoption.
“Rather than worrying about networks, identity, and operating systems, the Department of Defense Cloud Infrastructure as Code Environment for Azure allows the Sustainment Management System team to focus on the application and delivering our capabilities into our partners’ hands,” said Eric R. Mixon, Computer Scientist, U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center in a press release.
The solution will deliver “preconfigured, preauthorized” Platform as a Service environments that come with DISA Risk Management Executive authorization and “common control inheritance in eMASS [enterprise mission assurance support service] to expedite application assessment and authorization with your Authorization Official,” the company said.
“This will further the government’s ability to secure the supply chain and help defense industrial base companies harden environments to comply with recent DFARs updates and Cybersecurity Maturity Model certification requirements,” said Microsoft.
The DISA cloud announcement came as part of Microsoft’s announcement of new capabilities to assist agencies in modernizing mission systems and a larger DevSecOps initiative “designed to massively accelerate the application Authority to Operate process, so customers can rapidly get new capabilities into the hands of their operators and analysts.”
Further, Microsoft announced a multi-year collaboration with Intel and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the commercialization of fully homomorphic encryption to close gaps in data confidentiality.
