Summary

  • 3 minutes

The strategy of the US Government towards cloud computing has evolved through several decades.

The purpose of Sovereign Clouds

The reason that Sovereign Clouds exist can be grouped into four major categories:

  • Governance. Sovereign clouds provide the government to centralize its cloud workloads to a singular environment to provide transparency, prevent data siloing, drive innovation, and promote centers of excellence across all consumers.
  • Technology. Sovereign clouds provide the government the ability to ensure that it leverages the best technology that the private sector has created, while also providing technology it has developed for its individual missions.
  • Security. Sovereign clouds provide the government the security of data, storage, compute, and networking technologies on their terms.
  • Compliance. Sovereign clouds enforce higher levels of compliance to specific policies, memoranda, legislation, and executive order. Sovereign clouds ensure that the needs of a select audience are met before the needs of all consumers.

U.S. and non-U.S. Sovereign Clouds

While this module has covered sovereign clouds that have been developed to meet the needs of the US national, state, local and tribal governments, Microsoft and other Cloud Service Providers operate Sovereign Clouds to meet the needs of other governmental entities.

In addition to its Government offerings, Microsoft operates Azure Germany and Azure China to meet the regulatory compliance requirements of those sovereign nations.

Cloud hosting environment types

Azure Fundamentals introduces the concepts of Public, Private, and Hybrid clouds, all constructs that were developed and defined as part of NIST special publication 800-53.

Important

Public Clouds

  • Owned by cloud services or hosting provider
  • Provides resources and services to multiple organizations and users
  • Accessed via secure network connection (typically over the internet)

Private Clouds

  • Owned and operated by the organization that uses cloud resources
  • Organizations create a cloud environment in their datacenter
  • Self-service access to compute resources provided to users withing the organization
  • Organizations responsible for operating the services they provide

Hybrid Clouds

  • Combines Public and Private clouds to allow applications to run in the most appropriate location

These cloud models may all be considered General Purpose cloud environment types.

In this module, we identified a new cloud environment type, the "Fit for Purpose" cloud.

Important

Fit for Purpose Clouds

  • A "fit for purpose cloud" is one that is architected for a specific purpose: Artificial Intelligence, High Performance Compute, ultra low latency data transmission, tactical edge computing, etc.