Microsoft reveals plans for a government cloud platform
Microsoft officially announced plans for its rumored private government cloud service during a press and analyst briefing on its cloud momentum in San Francisco on October 7.
That government cloud service, codenamed "Fairfax," is a cloud offering for U.S. government customers specifically. (Fairfax, Virg., is the home of the General Services Administration, and close to other U.S. government agencies.)
Currently, Microsoft sells the same set of Windows Azure and Windows Server offerings to government users, alongside all other types of users. But Microsoft already sells a version of its Office 365 hosted app platform that's customized for government. Office 365 for Government is a multi-tenant service that stores US government data in a segregated community cloud.
