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.'"

Comments

Obligatory

[The Clockwork Troll]

Farm services server farm?

Re:Obligatory

[bami]

Server farm services farm servers.

I'm pretty sure there is a barn somewhere with a bar, using something provided by the USDA.

Re:Obligatory

[istartedi]

Government workers sitting around all day playing Farmville on spare servers from the farm service's server farm!

Re:Obligatory

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

No, clearly the move to Cloud computing was all to block Sun. Except Oracle's acquiring Sun, so I'm sure they saw that coming...

And I've got the "Dirt" on their new Google Earth competitor: Micro, Soft Earth. Perfect for farmers.

FTA: "separate, secure facility"

[base3]

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.

Re:FTA: "separate, secure facility"

[Anachragnome]

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.

Re:FTA: "separate, secure facility"

[hobo sapiens]

Microsoft cloud services will be just as awesome as Sharepoint!

egads.

Re:FTA: "separate, secure facility"

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

In MS speak, Cloud often means "just hosted" - there's not really a service model.

Re:FTA: "separate, secure facility"

[drsmithy]

Do YOU trust Microsoft to stay away from all that shiny information? I don't.

I struggle to see any manager looking at the cost/benefit of illegally accessing such information and coming away thinking "go for it".

Re:FTA: "separate, secure facility"

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for the USDA's Farm Service Agency in their database office and I can tell you that the program data that is collected is NOT part of this deal. There are no plans that I know of to move our databases off of our current SAN and to one managed by Microsoft. From TFA, it appears that this is limited to email and communication services, not database storage.

The Cloud

[pete6677]

The cloud will solve all of our problems.

Re:The Cloud

[c0lo]

The cloud will solve all of our problems.

Including the State Dept. ones: in 5 years time Wikileaks will go out of business - the documents will be leaking directly from the source.

Commercials

[SilverHatHacker]

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?

Purely money motivated

[Paska]

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.

Re:Purely money motivated

[Anonymous Coward]

You would be completely wrong in that regard, as the sub-agency that I work for (which is, indeed, shifting from Domino to Exchange along with the rest of the department) settled on the MS BPOS services after looking at the problem from a lot of different angles. Inasmuch as a public university often does have pseudo-governmental oversight in the form of their state legislature's laws, your experiences at your university do not in any way bear a resemblance to what the Dept of Ag is attempting to do. There is a pretty draconian SLA in place that will certainly bode ill for MS if their five 9's doesn't appear in practice.

Plus, there are *much* bigger issues at stake, such as legal requirements to capture and retain all email traffic for a given window of time. MS is agreeing to provide this service as a feature of their offering rather than forcing us to develop a massive internal data warehouse of all mail traffic that keeps everything for five years or more. (No, seriously. That's some of the crap we have to deal with.)

Probably the biggest selling point is that it is incredibly difficult... practically impossible... to fundamentally restructure a government agency along a whole new software platform. Don't just think about the email servers and clients. Think about the budget lines, the personnel teams, the fact that we don't have any internal SMEs for this new platform. Adding new FTEs to the government right now is nearly impossible. I've heard that USDA took a billion-dollar cut for the 11-12 fiscal cycle, which means adding expensive new teams is a non-starter. Plus, should we try to internalize these efforts, we'd have to go through the on-boarding of many contractors and the effort of standing up servers & SAN infrastructure at NITC. You have no idea how expensive it is to contract colo for servers at a GSA facility. The numbers of the MS contract are big, but the cost of doing it internally would probably be twice as much over the same period with poorer service.

It is true that many folks in the trenches have reservations, but no-one is arguing that we should continue to lumber along with Notes and Domino. In fact, there have been a small percentage of the staff who have requested that they be allowed to use Outlook, based upon the fact that Notes is a horribly byzantine email client.

So to sum up: Your cynicism is somewhat misplaced. And comparing your university of 10K students against our situation isn't very apropos, as just my agency is over four times as big as your entire university.

Re:Purely money motivated

[PJ6]

I've been arguing with customers for years that moving thick clients to web applications almost always makes deep, unacceptable sacrifices to basic usability, but everyone's all "web 2.0" this and "cloud" that. Look at how amazing these JavaScript frameworks are. We can do anything a thick client can do. Oh, really? Pfff. Not from where I'm looking. Forget the users, I guess.

Re:Purely money motivated

[TClevenger]

Yup. There's also a lot of administrative tasks you simply can't do--the inability to give one user full access to another user's mailbox being a glaring example. Apptix, though slower and clunkier, is a much more complete solution for hosted Exchange/Sharepoint.

Re:Purely money motivated

[Crazy Taco]

You guys could probably hire some more full time employees if you'd just fire some of the worthless ones. But I'm sure government unions prevent any of that from taking place. That and the fact that government never goes through a recession with the rest of the country, so you don't have to make the really deep cuts that would force you to be more efficient. Even a 1 billion dollar cut is nothing compared to the proportional cuts and restructiong going on in much of the private sector these last few years.

Sorry to be so cynical, but I hate big government. Not government, and not necessarilly every function that the government does, but I definitely hate big government, and most of all big government unions. All I ever seem to do is pay them to set my tax dollars ablaze.

Wikileaks

[z4ns4stu]

I guess now we know which government agency is going to have the next big document release on WikiLeaks...

Re:Wikileaks

[guyminuslife]

Wikileaks Targets USDA
New York Times Staff Writer

Fresh off the release of thousands of private State Department diplomatic cables, Wikileaks has announced that it has obtained over 35,000 confidential records from the US Department of Agriculture. According to spokesman Julian Assange, Wikileaks has been reviewing the documents for the past several months, and intends to release them on Sunday, following the Superbowl halftime commercial break. Assange, who has recently battled charges of sexual assault in Sweden, pedophilia in Britain, adultery in Saudi Arabia, male prostitution in Sri Lanka, public masturbation in Mozambique, and felony jaywalking in Turkmenistan, claims that these new leaks are "among the most important we've ever released."

The New York Times received advance copies of the leaked documents from a third party. From a preliminary review of the documents, here are some highlights:

* In November of 2009, a USDA investigator discovered that despite advertising claims, the ingredients of Snapple's chilled tea beverages were not, in fact, "the best stuff on Earth." The USDA pressured Snapple to improve the quality of its ingredients,

* Investigators discovered in June 2010 that a cattle ranch in Chugwater, Wyoming did not have any signs of mad cow disease, despite neighbors' claims that, "Ol' Bill cows make crazy, crazy good barbeque."

* In the minutes from private discussions, Secretary of Agricultre Tom Vilsack is on the record as saying, "Man, that Lindsay Lohan is too skinny. Way too skinny. She's drinking slim milk, she should be dirnking 2%." Key officials alleged that the white "mustache" below Ms. Lohan's nose was not, in fact, milk.

Although the source for the leak is not known, analysts suspect that Wikileaks obtained the documents when a team of hackers, operating out of a suburban basement filled with toy miniatures and Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks, was able to break into the USDA's cloud hosting service. The service, which is maintained by Microsoft, is reported to have suffered from a fatal security vulnerability when all of its servers simultaneously crashed with a "blue screen of death."

The government has already issued a release to all federal employees stating that, "these documents are not to be read during work hours" and that they remain confidential, despite the fact that they are no longer confidential.

The Justice Department would not make any official statements on the new leak, claiming that it is "part of an ongoing federal investigation that we're serious about, no, really, we're not kidding around, we're actually serious, please stop laughing." However, a source from within the Justice Department, who spoke under condition of anonymity, said that, "We will [expletive] murder Julian Assange. We will slice his [expletive] neck open and drink his blood to give us power over our enemies. Then we're gonna drag his corpse into the office, and beat it with out [expletives] like a pinata, and [expletive] on it. Whoever [expletives] last has to buy a round of drinks for the rest of the guys."

Said Assange, "With this release, we come ever closer to overthrowing the despotic American government and its unjust, tyrannical, wicked form of mixed capitalism and representative democracy. The people shall rise up against the machine, and at last seize the means of production! The revolution is nigh, dear comrades, for victory will come to those who spread Truth to the masses! Death to America! Death to Smoochy! AI-YEEE!!!"

Very large company ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Very large company ...

[afidel]

And blacklisted as well. I thank my lucky stars that 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.

Concerned...

[rs1n]

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

Re:Trust the cloud!

[jacks0n]

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.

Security is NOT an issue with The Cloud.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

MongoDB on Azure

[GWBasic]

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.

Re:MongoDB on Azure

[Jason Earl]

Tricky licensing is Microsoft's forte. Adding up the costs is always more difficult if Microsoft software is involved.

figures

[Nihn]

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.

Why does the USDA have 120,000 employees?

[hawguy]

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?

Re:Why does the USDA have 120,000 employees?

[ocdscouter]

The Forest Service is in that department, for example.

Re:Why does the USDA have 120,000 employees?

[mAriuZ]

They need it to reboot the microsoft cloud farm servers and to reinstall them (one employee per server)

Re:Why does the USDA have 120,000 employees?

[Anonymous Coward]

USDA does a wide variety of stuff related to agriculture. For example, at the agency I work for, our job is to keep invasive pest & disease species out of the US..

Re: that computer is called "the Internet"

[rnturn]

Yeah... It's amazing. It's like the network is the computer.

Well good luck with Azure service vs private cloud

[Crazy Taco]

If you are a Windows admin then I welcome you to the new world where Microsoft is not only your software provider, it is also your chief competitor.

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.