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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.'"
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.
From the article:
""The USDA requires Microsoft to provide offline access which which we do view as a basic not something vendors can expect somewhere down the line," Rizzo wrote, a dig at Google."
So, the tax-payer is basically paying Microsoft to run a server-farm, access to it both offline and online and software to utilize it. How is this different then the previous arrangement, besides them providing the server farm??
Microsoft will have access to all of the data stored. "But wait!", you might say, "They already have that." The difference here is that now we are GIVING it to them. The data sets that the USDA have on hand are more then just farm reports--they include everything from mortgage arrangements(like my own) to the inner workings of arrangements with companies like Monsanto and ConAgra. Personally, I think such data should be public information but I do not think that any corporation should be privy to such information ALONE.
Do YOU trust Microsoft to stay away from all that shiny information? I don't.