Microsoft announces Office 365 Secret Cloud environment now available

As industry invests in various cloud solutions to support the U.S. military, Microsoft announced yesterday that its Office 365 applications are available in the secret domain.

Microsoft, which is one of the four vendors that received a contract for the Defense Department’s up-to-$9-billion multicloud environment, Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, already has secret and top-secret classification for its Azure Government cloud solution.

Cloud service offerings from all four JWCC vendors have won DOD provisional authorization for data categorized as the Impact Level 5 security requirement, which protects data for controlled unclassified information, national security systems and more. A subset has clearance for the top classification level, IL6, which is reserved for information up to the secret level.

Office 365 Government Secret is the only cloud-based set of productivity and collaboration tools to have achieved IL6, Microsoft said, which allows “national security mission leaders to, for the first time, leverage a full cloud experience to not only collect, process and operationalize data, but to enable cloud-based collaboration and communication in the classified environment as well.”

This release of Office 365 Secret capabilities includes Exchange, Outlook and Microsoft 365 apps.