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USDA Services Moving To the Microsoft Cloud
JoltinJoe77 writes "Not to be outdone by Google, who recently announced an e-mail deal with the GSA, Microsoft is pressing forward with a migration of its own. 'The US Department of Agriculture is ready to go live with Microsoft's cloud services. In the next four weeks, the agency will move 120,000 users to Microsoft Online services, including e-mail, Web conferencing, document collaboration, and instant messaging.'"
Farm services server farm?
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
streamlined cork soakers
SInce the USDA's services are going to be delivered from a "separate, secure facility," this doesn't seem so much about the cloud as just a standard outsourcing arrangement.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
The cloud will solve all of our problems.
Time to start growing my own food to be safe.
for me to do a Symantec virus check on the whole MS cloud! This could take a while...
Seriously, good luck with all that migrationess! Irate users are quite quick to point out your failurings. I'll say a quick prayer for your users:
O God, ease our suffering in this, our moment of great dispair. Yea, admit these kind and decent users into thy arms of thine heavenly area, up there. And Moab, he lay us upon the band of the Canaanites, and yea, though the Hindus speak of karma, I implore you: give them a break.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
More all the reason to scramble your eggs, order your steak well done and avoid raw shellfish, cause you know the rock solid Microsoft security is going to keep the USDA files safe from malicious types. *rolls eyes*
Poor employees... Lost in MS's cloud for eternity...
Is this the same cloud that now magically includes Photoshop and VNC/Remote Desktop like in the Windows Live commercials? If so, can I look forward to cloud-enabled potatoes at the grocery store in the near future?
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
watch what they can do to your food supply.
The University of Canberra, Australia I am currently attending has in the last several months moved to Microsoft cloud services for e-mail, and calendaring and it's a bit of a joke.
Being friendly with the I.T. department it's clear that the motivation was purely monetary related.
As from a usability standpoint, students hate it. Junk filtering is a complete joke and is a common occurrence for student to teacher emails to not be delivered.
Forwarding simply does not work as advertised, if you have a "Redirect to" and then "Delete" rule one-after the other it's common for the rules to 'switch' around and for the delete to happen first.
The services are constantly down for urgent maintenance, slow and buggy in anything but Firefox (some features completely missing, like being able to create mail rules)/Internet Explorer.
It's a big joke, and I can guarantee you that the USDA decision to move to these services would have come from the top ranks and I.T. made to keep their mouths shut regarding the decision, just like my University.
The 'to the cloud' commercials annoy me. But the one in particular where the traveling couple gets delayed and RDPs to their specific home computer and watches a local recording remotely goes to show how the 'cloud' word is completely meaningless.
Ranks down there with the AT&T commercial that says 'the original name for the internet was the world wide web'. ARRGGHHHH.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I guess now we know which government agency is going to have the next big document release on WikiLeaks...
The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass. - Dogen
A very large company was told to use Microsoft's Azure Cloud this after a few high-up decision makers had a game of golf with some Microsoft people. Obviously, a computer server is just a computer server and since MS has some of those, it will work.
WRONG.
60,000+ servers inside that company are UNIX (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux, etc) and those programs don't run under Windows-whatever-the-name-is-this-year. When the technical architecture team got to Redmond and asked about that, the Microsoft tech guys agreed - there was no way to accomplish what was in their contract.
People that make technical decisions over golf probably shouldn't be allowed to make any decisions at all. I've seen it with other decisions at the company too. BEA was very happy after a golf game a few years ago.
BTW, the Microsoft "cloud" deployment was canned completely (not just scaled back to Windows-Servers-only). I hope that S-VP was sacked too.
I am a bit concerned that what appears to be an entire agency moving its operations toward complete dependency on a single commercial entity. It doesn't matter if the USDA were to use Google's cloud, or anyone else's cloud. What happens when said cloud "runs out of steam" so to speak -- meaning if there are problems with the cloud itself, you've essentially got an entire agency dead in the water. At least with the current setup, there are natural stop-gaps that prevent complete technical disasters. The operations of one department theoretically would not shut down the entire agency.
There is a lot of short-sightedness in thinking that the short-term savings on IT costs will outweigh the cost of recovering from even one day of said cloud being inaccessible. Of course, I write this with absolutely no consideration for any redundancy systems that are built into the cloud. But what good is the redundancy when the cloud becomes the target of a massive attack. Who/what do you rely on so as to continue your daily operations?
Has the government really been sold on The Emperor's New Cloud
I can't see any webmail solution being rich enough to replace Outlook. For example, Cached Exchange Mode (i.e. offline mode that actually works like it should) is extremely useful, and I can't see how webmail could provide that.
The USDA hasn't made a single wise or logical decision on their own in many years, so why should they start to now?
There's not much more to say on the topic. Though low bid doesn't imply low TOC. Or would that be TOL (total cost of leasing)?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
and loss of phone data and your games rentals year after costly year.
Why would any one risk MS?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Another step back to the 50s. Soon there will be just one central computer for every major city, and everyone connected to it. Just like Science Fiction predicted 60 years ago.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
All your cloud is belong to countries with other legal systems and much laxer privacy laws.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
Last week I watched a Microsoft Rep demonstrate MongoDB on Azure. He didn't even configure the database with enough space to store a single document. (MongoDB pre-allocates large blocks of disk space to avoid fragmentation.)
It seems like they're genuinely trying to make cloud services easier to to set up and administer; but they're doing a bad job of making it simple to understand. For example, I know that a VM at Rackspace costs $xx a month and does whatever I want it to do. In contrast, even though Azure has services that sound nice; the system itself is so difficult to understand that I don't know what I need to buy or how much it'll cost me.
No, I will not work for your startup
You know that Microsoft's marketing is currently attempting to "redefine" the "cloud" to muddy the waters so they can claim success with any of the half-baked ideas that issue of of its cloaca.
Next year, look for ads touting the "web" as the "cloud" and claiming every IIS server out there as a "cloud enabling" system.
Pu-leaze...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Now everything will start tasting like spam...
How exactly are they doing this without FISMA certification? Something sounds fishy
Comment removed based on user account deletion
yea, because when you need absolute protection for your data, go with the one who has to patch security flaws every other day. And to think..microsoft was probably the cheapest bidder.
who needs wikileaks when there is Microsoft Cloud.
Ok ok I will step down from my demagogy.
The biggest question this article raises in my mind is.... why does the USDA need 120,000 employees? There are only around 960,000 farmers in the USA - is it really necessary to have 1 USDA employee for every 9 farmers?
it's a trap.
We're already there and that computer is called "the Internet".
In the days of government snooping, foreign government hacking, and lack of respect for due process/checks and balances, I don't think I'll be using this cloud anytime soon.
...our SVP of IT is just a gadget freak and willing to do cutting edge rather than an idiot like in your example. He hates vendors and actually listens to his technical people when they bring up legitimate technical concerns.
Care to tell those of us looking for work what company you work for?
Yeah... It's amazing. It's like the network is the computer.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Pretty soon US crops will be destroyed by hordes of zombies and viruses and millions of starving Americans will flee to Mexico...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I'm already in that world... I work in the web hosting team for a Fortune 500 company (we host over 1000 websites for our corporation), and we've already got developers spouting off about how they want to use Windows Azure and move everything to the cloud. Why they want that, or what they truly think they are going to gain, I don't know. I think it's just excitement to be part of the latest buzzword trend, and they don't realize that what they already have now is essentially a "private cloud".
It's actually going to be funny if they do get to move to the cloud, because right now whenever things go wrong they blame us, and each time we dig into the issue and point out which part of their code caused the problem. We dig in to the point of doing analysis of memory dumps, often dropping everything to hunt for the problem if it is a critical issue on a big site. Good luck getting that kind of service when your code hosted on Windows Azure breaks.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Maybe the CIA and similar agencies will move their services to the cloud next and what fun that will be to watch. Might make getting documents for Wikileaks a bit easier.
How are they planning to 'Beef' up security on the cloud?
A nice farm server we have here. A shame if anything would happen to it.
At least, with the Cloud, Mr Beeks does not need to go places any more to get those "stupid old crop reports" from the department of Agriculture ...
IMO, this will just provide more reasons for the black hat community to focus on compromising MS' cloud environment. Government sites and services have long been the playground of developing crackers, so I'm guessing many will just see getting into the USDA's cloud presence as a new challenge.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Computing goes in cycles, as always. There's nothing new about the concept. Now, stuff is moving online to server farms, since companies are able to manage resources most effectively. In another decade or so, things may start to come back to desktop computing. Maybe people will have small servers built into their routers that all devices will sync to, i don't know.
And if things do end up moving all the way to hosted solutions, with the standard being thin clients in every home, why would we bother with one in each city? Bandwidth's getting cheap enough now that we could go with two or three hubs to a continent and have that be our computers.
Do YOU trust Microsoft to stay away from all that shiny information? I don't.
Google is an advertisement company. I'd rather MS have the data than slimy ad executives which google employs by the dozens to run their business.
On a related note, I'm always amazed at the 'useful idiot' open source cheerleaders google manages to attract while ironically keeping everything of relevance closed source and throwing out a few crumbs of OSS code here and there.
Has a Silverlight lining... I'll be here all week, try the veal.
...Wikileaks' job will be much easier.
Umm, given the security pedigree of Microsoft I assume this deal was struck by a Wikileaks supporter?
Just curious :-)
Insert
Why would anyone risk ANYONE?
FFS, Eric Schmidt made MS evil.