Microsoft Corp. has said it will open up two new Azure Government cloud data centers in the U.S. early next year.

The new facilities will be located in Arizona and Texas, and will join Microsoft’s existing Government Cloud data centers in Iowa and Virginia, helping to provide much lower latency cloud services for federal agencies, the company said.

“Now, Microsoft has a total of six dedicated regions for government customers—significantly more than any other cloud provider,” Jason Zander, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure, said in a statement. “Combined with dedicated Government ExpressRoute options, Microsoft offers government agencies broad choice of where they host their data and where they connect directly to Microsoft’s infrastructure.”

Along with the new facilities, Microsoft said it is planning to release a tailor-made version of Office 365 and its Azure cloud specifically for the U.S. Department of Defense. These services, delivered from two separate regions, will be physically isolated from Microsoft’s commercial cloud services. The intent is to enable high-security access to Office software and Azure cloud services to the U.S. military by the end of the year, the company said. DoD networks will be connected via Microsoft’s private and highly secure ExpressRoute link, which bypasses the World Wide Web.

The two announcements would suggest that Microsoft is powering ahead in its bid to become the go-to cloud technology provider for the U.S. government, and come hot on the heels of Microsoft’s Azure Blueprint program, which was released last week. The Azure Blueprint is a resource government agencies can use to plan compliant and secure cloud deployments, offering guidance on how to roll out services that meet agencies’ strict security requirements.

Microsoft says its Azure Government cloud now boasts more than 7,000 federal, municipal and state-level government customers. More than six million government workers are now using its cloud app and services suite, and the company is also gaining real traction among law enforcement agencies across the U.S.

“Microsoft has signed Criminal Justice Information Services agreements in 23 states, covering more than 60 percent of the U.S. population,” Zander said.

Microsoft isn’t totally dominant in the government sector though, with companies like Amazon Web Services and IBM both aggressively fighting for their own slice of the pie. Just last month, AWS said it had signed CJIS agreements with the states of Oregon and Louisiana, giving government agencies there the option to use its own cloud services. And earlier this year, IB announced it was chosen to deliver cloud services for the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency.

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