With the release of Microsoft Office 365 Government Secret Cloud, the company’s top-tier collaboration platform now be used in a safe and private setting.

Microsoft announced the release on the Microsoft 365 (M365) Blog, claiming that the release brings a level of security and compliance to its productivity tools suitable for government use by providing especially secure variants of email clients Exchange and Outlook in addition to its office software suite.

The most obvious use of M365’s new environment is to ensure data integrity. Microsoft acknowledges that most government data is housed on on-premises servers, but claims that with its newest release, all of this work can be moved to cloud storage using its SaaS.

Data stored in the cloud by government agencies is now protected “up to the SECRET level” thanks to M365, the only set of business productivity tools to offer “an Impact Level 6 (IL6) (opens in new tab) environment,” a data handling protocol developed by the Department of Defense’s Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).

Another first, according to Microsoft, “cloud based collaboration and communication” may now be brought to classified situations via M365 Government Secret Cloud.

With the addition of M365’s new features, Azure Government Secret and Top Secret, “air-gapped” zones of the company’s cloud architecture that provide enhanced security and visibility, may confidently make that claim.

When Microsoft announced Azure Government Top Secret in August 2021, the company promised that the specialised Azure regions will help “mission leaders” gain insights from data more quickly and provide “unified cybersecurity capabilities” to safeguard the nation’s most sensitive information.