The unique and evolving requirements of certain Government customers in the United States create many problems for cloud providers such as Microsoft. With an emphasis on increased security and rigorous access controls, public cloud is not an option for the Department of Defense or other departments that require highly secure environments. The Office 365 US Government offering provides an Office 365 capability to vetted organizations that need secure working environments but also want the benefits of being in the cloud. Based upon the Government Community Cloud (‘GCC’) offering, GCC High brings military-grade standards and controls to the Microsoft Cloud that enables accredited agencies and contractors to work with controlled unclassified information (known as ‘CUI’) alongside the DoD like never before.With demanding vetting requirements for both organizations and Microsoft staff that need to access customer tenants, the GCC High offering is a modern example of how end-to-end security is maintained as much in the human and business space as it is in the technical.
Which Office 365 features are available in GCC High?
As you would expect, the services available within GCC High are a subset of the full range of Office 365 services available in a non-GCC tenant, providing a number of core services that include:
- Exchange Online (minus certain PBX and calling features)
- SharePoint Online (with cross-tenant sharing enabled to other GCC tenants)
- OneDrive for Business
- Skype for Business (with Teams on the way)
- PowerApps (with some functionality removed)
In addition to the core services, several specific enhancements are provided within GCC High including; secure VoIP integration, multi-factor authentication as well as variants of many of the security features of Office 365 that are specific to GCC High requirements. Being purposed specifically for vetted US Government clients and contractors, GCC High is currently only available for use within mainland USA. Microsoft is exploring how services of similar types could be provided to non-US government customers across the many available regions of Office 365.
Planning an implementation of GCC High?
Henson Group’s unique combination of best-of-breed products and real-world experience enables us to define, design and execute a migration strategy to meet your business and technical needs, no matter how complex.
Throughout migration and beyond, our products will continue to add value to your investment in GCC High providing capability including:
- 360° insights into your content through powerful AI powered analytics and reporting
- Content enrichment thanks to automated metadata extraction and intelligent classification
- Improved Information Architecture as a result of deeper understanding of information types
- On-going user experience improvement via real-time and on-demand data classification
Make your migration simple.
Henson Group helps public and private organizations worldwide transition to Intelligent Workplaces built upon SharePoint, Teams and Azure. We provide augmented content analytics, intelligent classification and metadata extraction, automated migration, information protection and governance solutions by utilizing AI/Deep Learning. We are a Microsoft Gold Partner, a Microsoft Preferred Partner in Content Services and a Microsoft Chartered Partner in Content Services.