Happy new year to everyone!

As I enter my 9th year at Microsoft, I have switched roles, and am now an Industry Advisor in Federal Civilian, helping our Federal Civilian customers deliver on their missions through the Microsoft cloud. Microsoft has many different industry groups, such as healthcare, retail, and finance, and Federal is another industry group, with three operating units under it: Defense (Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines, defense contractors, etc), Intel (intelligence agencies), and Civilian (everything else: NASA, DOE, USPS, FAA, DOJ, IRS, DEA, and many more). So, this will be a much different type of customers than I have worked with in the past and am greatly looking forward to it. If you are working for a federal company and wish to have a chat with me, let your Microsoft account team know.

Note that in addition to the commercial cloud, Microsoft also has government cloud as well as Classified Cloud for Secret and Top Secret to handle classified workloads (see Azure Government for national security and Azure Government Top Secret now generally available for US national security missions). They work just like the commercial cloud but might not have all the same services so check out the Azure geographies and explore products by region. Many of the federal companies that I work with have classified workloads and the government and classified clouds solve their extra security needs.

A point of clarification: the government clouds as well as all Azure public regions in the United States meet US Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High impact level and meet FedRAMP High Provisional Authorization to Operate (P-ATO). Also, all products in the government clouds are FedRAMP certified (see list), and most products in the public cloud are also FedRAMP certified (see list). So that means many government agencies are able to use the public cloud.

Here is the breakdown of all the Azure cloud environments available:

• Azure is available globally. It is sometimes referred to as Azure commercial, Azure public, or Azure global.
• Azure China is available through a unique partnership between Microsoft and 21Vianet, one of the country’s largest Internet providers.
• Azure Government is available from five regions in the United States to US government agencies and their partners. Two regions (US DoD Central and US DoD East) are reserved for exclusive use by the US Department of Defense.
• Azure Government Secret is available from three regions exclusively for the needs of US Government and designed to accommodate classified Secret workloads and native connectivity to classified networks.
• Azure Government Top Secret serves the national security mission and empowers leaders across the Intelligence Community (IC), Department of Defense (DoD), and Federal Civilian agencies to process national security workloads classified at the US Top Secret level.

More info: Understanding Compliance Between Commercial, Government and DoD Offerings – March 2022 Update, FedRAMP overview, Is it Azure, Azure Gov, or GCC High?

This will be my fifth role change within Microsoft, and it’s similar to a Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) role I had when I first joined Microsoft, although we were called Technical Sales Professionals (TSP) back then (I first started by selling the parallel data warehouse, the precursor to Azure Synapse). An Industry Advisor is sort of a mash-up between a seller and an architect. Industry Advisor’s and CSA’s are very unique roles that you don’t find in many other companies: we are trying to sell the value of the Azure cloud to companies, as opposed to trying to sell them services or products. If you are a customer of Microsoft, you have a day job and don’t have the time to keep up with all the technology. That is why architects like me exist within Microsoft: to learn about a customer’s business and keep updated on the technologies to help the customer choose the best architectures and products for their use cases. My goal is to educate customers and get them excited about building a solution on Azure. Education can be in the form of ideation sessions, strategy sessions, architecture sessions, demos, hackathons, workshops, POC’s or just a conversation to show them the “art of the possible” with Azure. Once a customer decides they want to build a solution on Azure, they go off to build that solution on their own or with a partner, and I can help with that transition.

Finally, I have been writing a book the last couple of months on data architectures that greatly expands on my previous blogs and presentations such as “Data Lakehouse, Data Mesh, and Data Fabric (video)” and “Data Warehousing Trends, Best Practices, and Future Outlook (video)”. More details to come later!