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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.'"
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 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.
that will be illegal of course.
1. It violates Pharma Industry IP.
2. It violates food safety regulations.
3. Since eating unregulated food is a health risk, we can't give you a health care policy. Oh, and you're required to have one. From us.
4. It's the same as not paying taxes.
5. Your land has been reclassified as protected wetlands.
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
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?