Setting up multi-tenant projects in Azure with federal agencies

IT professionals in the federal space across different offices and bureaus within agencies are actively discussing a range of topics related to standing up their own tenants to meet unique requirements. Agency specifics cannot be shared for obvious reasons, but one can imagine how some agencies need to have tenant locations overseas or manage many different subdivisions. An example might be the Air Force within the Department of Defense.

Bureaus within an agency and individual offices may want to stand up their own tenants because of specific budgets and requirements that require tailoring towards their IT operations.  Multi-tenant projects are currently a critical topic when it comes to managing IT workloads. Some apps follow a SaaS model, while others rely on PaaS. Planning for multi-tenant environments involves accounting for specific requirements and identifying the path forward whether that is “lift and shift,” a modernization, or an improvement to infrastructure.

Why do agencies choose Azure? Ninety five percent of government app operations are on Windows. Only a few workloads such as servers come with Linux operations. Because Microsoft already has a significant presence within agencies, it is easy to build a “sister” relationship with Azure. However, if an agency has in-house software built on Linux, they tend to adopt AWS which has a competitive advantage for this type of lift and shift. Sometimes the choice of cloud comes down to something as simple as management preference, GUI, or style of operation.

What form does a multi-tenant setup take? Some agencies work exclusively with Azure throughout the process, while others may need multi-cloud environments to support particular SaaS apps. For instance, one of the agencies I’m working with right now has a multi-cloud environment, split between AWS and Azure.