A managed Microsoft Azure service for deploying isolated cloud environments for sensitive workloads
Today, Microsoft marks a milestone with the general availability of Azure Enclave in both Azure and Azure for US Government. Azure Enclave is a managed Azure service designed to help organizations streamline the deployment and management of their isolated cloud environments for sensitive and special access workloads while applying policy governance and monitoring.
For US Government agencies and the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), Azure Enclave builds on Microsoft’s experience supporting sensitive, classified, and special access program missions where agencies, mission partners, contractors, national laboratories, academic institutions, and suppliers need to work together across organizational boundaries. That experience requires a repeatable approach to network isolation, explicit connectivity, and centralized visibility.
Those needs are not unique to a single mission or sector. Governments worldwide and organizations in highly regulated industries also need to collaborate around sensitive information while maintaining strong controls over access, connectivity, monitoring, and operations. Azure Enclave addresses that shared challenge by helping organizations start from a governed foundation rather than assembling custom isolation architectures independently for every program or workload.
A repeatable foundation for mission success
Sensitive government work rarely occurs within a single program office, agency, or organization. Agencies may need to collaborate with mission partners, contractors, suppliers, national laboratories, or academic institutions, and some participants may not have the resources to independently establish and manage a complex isolated environment.
Azure Enclave brings together managed infrastructure and predefined architectural isolation patterns so organizations can begin with a foundation designed for isolation and adapt it to their workload, policy, and operational requirements. The service uses a community-and-enclave model: a community provides shared network controls, while each enclave provides an isolated workload boundary. Policy and routing controls can be applied across explicitly approved connection paths among authorized users, applications, services, and data.
This model helps teams streamline planning, configuration, testing, and ongoing management. Workload resources can span subscriptions while organizations apply shared governance across related enclaves, giving agencies and partners a consistent way to establish compartmentalized, policy-governed environments, potentially reducing the need to create one-off architectures for every workload.
Delivering mission-critical capabilities requires infrastructure that helps us move quickly without compromising security. Azure Enclave helps simplify the deployment of applications and services across secure, isolated environments, allowing us to provision mission workloads and expand capacity more efficiently while maintaining the controls our customers require. This enables teams to spend less time managing infrastructure and more time focused on delivering outcomes for the mission.
—Justin Shirk, Joint & Strategic Defense Lead at Accenture Federal Services
Our customers are looking for ways to modernize sensitive workloads without compromising security, compliance, or operational effectiveness. Azure Enclave helps address that challenge by reducing the complexity of establishing secure cloud environments and enabling trusted collaboration at scale. Azure Enclave is well-aligned to the security standards the US Government and its partners rely on, making compliance reviews and security conversations much easier compared to traditional deployment models. Combined with our expertise in cloud operations, security and compliance, we look forward to helping our customers accelerate their delivery while staying focused on what matters most: the mission.
—Carroll Moon, CEO and co-founder, CloudFit
Layered security, governance, and visibility
Azure Enclave is designed around a defense-in-depth approach. Virtual networking infrastructure is isolated by default, connections are explicitly configured and managed by the customer, and Azure Policy supports policy governance across communities and enclaves. Network segmentation, role-based access, controlled endpoints, defined permissions, and approval workflows provide multiple layers of control and oversight.
Centralized logging and built-in observability help teams monitor access, configuration changes, and data flows. Security alerts and analytics can be established with Microsoft Sentinel or other Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools. This will provide additional visibility into activity and system changes, helping mission owners, security teams, platform teams, application teams, and compliance stakeholders maintain a clearer view of an environment’s posture.
Azure Enclave complements, rather than replaces, an organization’s broader security and compliance program; customers remain responsible for configuring their environments, evaluating the service against applicable requirements, and meeting the obligations associated with their workloads. For US Government agencies and their partners, Azure Enclave provides a governed foundation for sensitive mission workloads, with accreditation efforts underway to comply with FedRAMP and DoD Impact Levels 4, 5, and 6, as well as Intelligence Community environments governed by ICD 503 requirements. Its tools are designed to support alignment with the applicable requirements as workloads move across classifications up to the Top Secret level.
Extending the model to worldwide governments and regulated industries
Government organizations worldwide may face similar requirements to control connectivity, govern access, monitor activity, and collaborate with external institutions or partners. Azure Enclave can provide a repeatable model for isolated environments, while each organization remains responsible for evaluating its deployment against the legal, regulatory, security, and operational requirements applicable to its workloads.
Highly regulated industries face similar collaboration and data-protection challenges. Healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, and research institutions can establish isolated environments for projects involving protected health information, clinical research, genomic data, and other sensitive datasets. Universities, laboratories, and research organizations can create shared environments for joint studies and multidisciplinary programs while maintaining separation among projects and applying consistent controls. Financial institutions can use isolated environments to support sensitive analytics, risk modeling, regulatory reporting, and controlled collaboration involving confidential financial information.
Azure Enclave provides capabilities for bringing authorized users, applications, services, and data into controlled environments while preserving boundaries between workloads.
Get started with Azure Enclave
Azure Enclave helps support sensitive collaboration by helping reduce the complexity of the underlying infrastructure, allowing teams to focus on mission, research, services, and business outcomes.
Organizations can start with a focused deployment for one workload and a defined group of users, then expand to include additional teams, applications, partners, or data sources. Azure Enclave supports that progression by enabling users to group enclaves with similar requirements into communities, deploy workload resources across subscriptions, and manage access at the application level. This structure gives organizations a path to evolve deployments as mission and operational requirements change while maintaining a consistent approach to isolation, governance, and observability.
Explore Azure Enclave to learn more about its capabilities, use cases, and pricing. Connect with your Microsoft representative to discuss how Azure Enclave can support your organization’s security, governance, operational, and collaboration requirements.
Azure Enclave
Streamlines the deployment and management of isolated cloud environments for sensitive workloads.
