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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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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!!!"
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
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?