Microsoft Corp. is stepping up its efforts to cater to governments looking to use the cloud.

The launch of a new Azure Blueprint program provides agencies with guidance on how to ensure compliance while using its cloud services. Microsoft Azure Government, as the company’s cloud offering for government agencies is known, has already achieved a number of certifications that show it meets the security requirements of the U.S. federal government. But Microsoft thinks those guarantees alone aren’t enough to convince some agencies.

That’s where the new Azure Blueprint program comes in. “The initial release includes documentation to assist Azure customers with documenting their security control implementations as part of their individual agency ATO [Authority to Operate] processes,” Nate Johnson, a Microsoft senior manager, said in a blog post. “The FedRAMP Moderate baseline Customer Responsibility Matrix  and System Security Plan template are designed for use by program managers, information system security officers and other security personnel who are documenting system-specific security controls within Azure Cloud.”

Microsoft plans to update its CRM and SSP template with baselines that address the FedRAMP High and DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) Impact Levels 4 and 5, Johnson added.

In addition, Microsoft has made available its Log Analytics service in its hybrid-cloud management software and services bundle, called the Operations Management Suite . Sarah Weldon, Microsoft Azure program manager, said in a second post that this real-time insights via integrated search and custom dashboards, allowing government users to analyze millions of records across their workloads and servers, regardless of their location.

Last, the company said its Azure App Service has been made generally available in the Microsoft Azure Government cloud. The Azure App Service bundles together Microsoft’s Azure Websites, Azure Mobile Services and Azure BizTalk services into a single offering, and will provide government agency developers with a new platform for building and deploying mobile and web-based applications. Microsoft said it’s aiming to reduce the gap in services between its government and general public version of App Services, and will add features including the App Service Editor, MySQL in-app and VNET (virtual network) integration soon.

There’s a lot of money to be made from catering to the U.S. government’s cloud computing needs, and Microsoft is facing stiff competition from other vendors as it chases those federal dollars. Just last month for example, Oracle announced grand plans to build next-generation cloud data centers in an assault on Amazon Web Services’ dominance of the cloud computing market. Oracle’s new cloud-app data centers are targeted at the federal government and U.S. military, as well as the financial services, oil and gas, and aerospace industries.

Smaller companies are making a move on the government space too. In August, Unisys Corp. revealed it had signed a $232 million contract with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to provide it with a DevOps environment based on Amazon Web Services, so it can modernize its apps and deploy them on its own cloud computing infrastructure.

Image credit: Wokandapix via pixabay