Harris Exits Cloud Hosting, Citing Fed Server Hugging

miller60 writes "Despite the publicity around the U.S. Government's 'Cloud First' approach to IT, many agencies are reluctant to shift mission critical assets to third-party facilities. That's the analysis from Harris Corp., which has decided to get out of the cloud hosting business and sell a data center in Virginia, just two years after it spent $200 million to build and equip it. 'It's becoming clear that customers, both government and commercial, currently have a preference for on-premise versus off-premise solutions,' said Harris' CEO."

Comments

Server Hugging

[stevegee58]

Have you hugged your server today?

Re:Server Hugging

[hodet]

By fed server hugging the first thing I thought of was the fed having easy access to my servers. That would be a real concern for me if using an American cloud hosting provider, as I am not located in the US. Do these companies have any choice but to bend over to the government when they are told?

Re:Server Hugging

[gstoddart]

That would be a real concern for me if using an American cloud hosting provider, as I am not located in the US. Do these companies have any choice but to bend over to the government when they are told?

You are correct, they have no choice.

The wording of the USA Patriot Act allows them to basically demand data from any US company (it might even be US owned). So, any data there you should consider to be essentially available to the Americans on a whim.

I've done some consulting for the Canadian government, and we legally can't store any data on any servers in the US or host certain data with US owned companies. Because, if the US authorities came in and demanded it, they'd have to hand it over and be legally bound to secrecy and not tell anybody it happened. Not a good situation for confidential government data with private information in it.

So, if you have data you don't want to be subject to US rules, the only solution is to not store it with them, and possibly not with anybody owned by a US company.

I believe the EU has encountered some situations in which companies can either be breaking the EU laws, or breaking the US laws ... it's not possible to be in compliance with both if one prevents you giving access, and the other insists they get it.

The only way to keep your data secure, is to keep it in-house.

Re:Server Hugging

[berashith]

so this is proof that the canadians are terrorists! If there is nothing to hide then why are they hiding it?

Re:Server Hugging

[jc42]

If there is nothing to hide then why are they hiding it?

They'd probably be happy to tell you after you post all your login account names, number and passwords online. You don't have anything to hide, do you?

You're welcome to post them in a reply to this message ...

Re:Server Hugging

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I believe the EU has encountered some situations in which companies can either be breaking the EU laws, or breaking the US laws ... it's not possible to be in compliance with both if one prevents you giving access, and the other insists they get it.

IIRC, one potential conflict (I know of no actual test case yet) is that EU privacy rules forbid the export of personal data to places without adequate safeguards (which includes the US), but the US has laws that any US-based business must hand over any data it has to the US government on demand under certain circumstances. If the US company operates an office within the EU, normally keeps personal data from the EU within the EU, but gets a demand for the data via its US head office, they could be in a legal grey area (or more precisely, they could be in a very black-and-white situation according to the law in both jurisdictions, but those situations would conflict).

I have to wonder how much subtle background damage US government/business culture might be doing to the US economy today. On the one hand, there is the very laissez-faire attitude to innovation, which includes an unusually tolerant approach (by global standards) to invasion of individual privacy by businesses, which leads to conflicting standards like the one we're talking about above when you start trading internationally. On the other hand, there seems to be a trend that is very much not laissez-faire recently when it comes to government intervention, and in particular government control of communications infrastructure and rights to access data, which was collected by businesses rather than the government itself, on demand in various contexts. Again, the end result is concerns about privacy and even industrial espionage.

Perhaps in the US culture this is supposed to be dealt with by the courts. If an organisation has the resources to bring a successful lawsuit, it can actually reshape the law in the US. (This is very different to the situation in various other jurisdictions, where case law can set precedents for interpreting statutes but can never override them.)

However, the result of that culture is that you have an economy where businesses operate relatively unrestricted yet always under the shadow of government intervention, and where lawsuits are thrown around as commercial weapons as just "a cost of doing business". Obviously having a legal system is not unique to the US, but it does seem to favour a very litigious approach where the ground rules are vague if there are any at all, and that uncertainty always carries a cost.

For example, I have a company in the UK that does IT contract work, and we carry a professional indemnity insurance policy. The terms of that policy specifically exclude any work done in the US (or Canada, curiously) from the cover. That's a pretty clear suggestion that the insurance underwriters consider the risk of being involved in an expensive lawsuit in the US or Canada so high that they would rather lose the custom of any business that works there. That in turn is a strong disincentive for my company (and the many others who belong to the same professional bodies as we do and who take out the same associated insurance policies) to do business with anyone in the US or Canada. I don't know whether that pattern is repeated elsewhere in Europe or around the world, but given that the insurers are basically interested in the money, it seems likely. If so, that's a serious impediment to international trade for business in the US, and maybe we're starting to see the results with stories like the one we're discussing in this thread.

Re:Server Hugging

[gstoddart]

This is very different to the situation in various other jurisdictions, where case law can set precedents for interpreting statutes but can never override them.

In theory, in having some overriding principles (ie the Constitution), laws which are indefensible will fall as they fail to meet a certain standard, or exceed certain bounds. I should hope that nobody could ever pass a law saying slavery was legal, for instance.

If case law can't overturn statutes, then you can pass any absurd, draconian, or otherwise bone-headed law ... and there is no recourse for the courts to strike down that law. So, if someone manages to pass a law saying that to criticize the government is to commit treason ... well, who wants to live there?

Personally, I find it far more scary that laws can be passed that don't have some form of minimum standards to compare them against, and no recourse to redress unjust laws.

Though, in fairness, there seem to be loads of things lately which seem to be in violation of the Constitution, so maybe it's just wishful thinking that there's still any noble, guiding principles any more.

sorry, but nothing changed

[Nyder]

No one wanted cloud storage, but some businesses.

The only thing worse then saying something bad happened and all our data is gone, is saying, the cloud disappeared and all our data is gone.

Re:sorry, but nothing changed

[MightyMartian]

For some of us it's the simple reality that our data is out of our hands. Yes, we can encrypt, and that offers some security, but you're still left with the fact that you're going to need some sort of third site backup to truly make sure your data can survive a catastrophe (including the cloud provider being raided, its/your servers ending up in an evidence room for an indeterminate amount of time) that could destroy or make inaccessible critical business data.

I think there's a place for it, but in the type of business I'm in, where contractual and legislative obligations on securing of confidential data is quite stringent, the cloud just doesn't offer what we want. Data out of our custody is data out of our control.

Re:sorry, but nothing changed

[ColdWetDog]

Don't worry, they're still gunning for your business:

Harris will instead focus on providing secure networks and cloud solutions for customers on their own premises.

'cloud solutions for customers on their own premises'

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means....

Re:sorry, but nothing changed

[vlm]

Data out of our custody is data out of our control.

Oldest story in the endless repetition of the IT world. Reliability. Lets say you're a midlevel manager in charge of providing email service to the biz.

1) Hire a low level sysadmin to run a server in the basement, he knows he's fired if the server isn't up 100% of the time, if he doesn't respond to your slightest whim at 2am every morning, or instantly correctly answer the dumbest question. Paying a server jockey $60K/yr just to run email, makes sense if reliable email brings in $3M/yr of revenue in your biz and unreliable email brings in $0M/yr. This option gets you a promotion because you did so well.

2) Or cloud it for $50/month, and the boss selected the provider for you on the basis of how good the season tickets were and/or how hot the saleswoman is. The provider knows they have a bullet proof legal contract that makes them responsible for pretty much nothing, and if you leave the provider doesn't care because each customer is only about 0.01% of their total revenue anyway. If its not working as you prefer, you have no leverage over the provider unless you are one of their top 10 customers (if you have to ask, you're not), what are you going to do, make your boss look bad for selecting the wrong provider for you, or cancel a multi-year contract resulting in days to weeks of downtime and involving legal. This option simply gets you fired.

Last cycle of the eternal IT wheel I was a very small cog in a very large machine at a provider fitting option 2 and I know some customers got fired for buying email service from my ex employer, always awkward to call a customer about an old trouble ticket and be told they got fired because of your service (whoops). Clouding your web server today is no different than clouding your email IMAP and POP server a decade ago. Dumb career ending move for management unless you're in such a ridiculous special case that they may as well write a book just about you.

Re:sorry, but nothing changed

[tqk]

The only thing worse [than] saying something bad happened and all our data is gone, is saying, the cloud disappeared and all our data is gone.

Actually, this story sounds a lot like the last high-tech startup I worked with. These guys (Harris) listened to the buzz, drank the koolaid, blew $200m on a data centre/center, yet put no further effort into thinking about how to do it in a way that it would be salable. "But, but, it's the cloud!", expecting the buzz words to do all the work for them. In the case of my HT startup, "Are you wanting to track people or materiel? Do you want to track incoming and outgoing, or location on site if on site?" "Uh, yeah!" They had an idea, but no plan as to what they wanted to do with it.

Secondly, gov't moves slooooooowly. They should have predicted they'd be in for the long haul if they expected this to work for them. Instead, they're quick buck artists, expecting buzz words to do all the hard work. I'm not a bit surprised they're now running away screaming "lalalalala."

"Cyber Integrated Solutions"! Jeebus!

As this market evolves, it's also becoming clearer that customers don't place additional value on trust and are unwilling to move the most mission critical applications to the cloud before less sensitive applications are thoroughly tested and vetted in a cloud environment, Brown added.

Well, WTF? and duh! Who hired these fools, and have they had any experience with large scale IT deployment?

Or, maybe those guys down the road who were doing it right just showed potential customers what doofuses these guys were.

Re:sorry, but nothing changed

[vlm]

Secondly, gov't moves slooooooowly. They should have predicted they'd be in for the long haul if they expected this to work for them. Instead, they're quick buck artists, expecting buzz words to do all the hard work. I'm not a bit surprised they're now running away screaming "lalalalala."

Thirdly? a lot of these type of deals are "we will dump $200M into this and some greater fool will come along and buy the works from us for $250M next year insta-profit!" Whoops no one showed up. Oh well, dump it.

Re:sorry, but nothing changed

[Anonymous Coward]

But guys! Guys! Come on! It's Great! All you gotta do is just put your data in THE CLOUUUUUUD!!!

You guys like clouds, right? Everyone likes clouds! Their floaty, and fluffy, and you can always find shapes of cute little bunnies in them! Who wouldn't want their data in something like that? And oh yeah! Star Wars! Remember Star Wars? Putting your data in the cloud is just like being Lando! Remember how cool he was?

So yeah, guys... Clouds!

I know the marketing megaphone can turn any buzzword into a shrieking noise that makes your ears bleed, but I have hated this cloud bullshit, since the moment Amazon started farting up press releases with their EC2 product.

Fact is, someone else's cloud is only good for data you don't care about. If the data is useless. Put it in a cloud. Don't care about backups? Put it in some other assholes cloud. Free cloud storage? Yes, please, take some of my garbage. I don't want it stinking up my own personal hard drives, and I'm sick of looking at these piles of DVDs.

But in reality, a cluster of clusters is only cool if the computers actually belong to you. Everyone likes clouds. But only THEIR clouds.

Re:sorry, but nothing changed

[TheRaven64]

Except that's not how it works. If you host the data on site and there is any down time, then you lose your bonus because your department failed to meet targets. You are also seen as a cost centre. On the other hand, you pay that $50/month and you can show the savings for the the $60K/year salary and get a big bonus. Now the down time is someone else's fault, so it doesn't affect you. The fact that the contract doesn't let you charge the outsourced company is legal's fault, not yours, so you keep the bonus. At the end of the year, you put 'saved current employer $100K/year in overheads' on your CV and move onto the next company. Sure, you may have cost the company $3M in lost business, but that's not in your department's accounting...

Re:sorry, but nothing changed

[Anonymous Coward]

They should have been on an episode of Ramsey's Cluster Nightmares.

Re:sorry, but nothing changed

[turbidostato]

"The only thing worse then saying something bad happened and all our data is gone, is saying, the cloud disappeared and all our data is gone."

It was never the case. The worse thing than saying "all our data is gone" is "*I* made all that data to go through the bathtub". CYA is as strong if not stronger on managed services "in the cloud" than on premises.

Re:sorry, but nothing changed

[TooMuchToDo]

So the only option is to virtualize off-site? You still get huge cost savings from doing virtualization in-house, its just not as profitable (with recurring revenue) to a third-party service provider.

Also, I want to stab people who use the marketing term "the cloud". It's not dark magic. Its virtualized, resilient resources.

Re:sorry, but nothing changed

[arkane1234]

You're not looking for a cloud in this case, you're looking for offsite storage. There's a difference.

Re:sorry, but nothing changed

[tqk]

Thirdly? a lot of these type of deals are "we will dump $200M into this ...

Did you notice this was $200m to upgrade an existing facility? What, you buy the whole thing lock, stock, and barrel, then Holmes on Homes style rip everything out and throw it away, then buy and replace it with all brand new, state of the art, fully stocked and finished (not bothering to roll out what you need when customers show up wanting it)?

Does that really go for $200m these days, or how much of that went to wood paneling and deep broadloom carpets for the executive offices, and seasons tickets, and team building exercises in Aruba? $200m to upgrade an existing facility, really? I know it was gubmint work and $200 hammers are cheap in that space, but still, wtf?!?

Re:sorry, but nothing changed

[dkf]

'cloud solutions for customers on their own premises'

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means....

An awful lot of larger businesses are internally structured as a group of smaller businesses, with "contracts" between business units. (Yes, they're not formally contracts, but the main difference on a practical level is that it is the CEO of the overall company who is the ultimate decider of last resort, not the law.) Within such a setting, an "internal" cloud can still make a lot of sense and the technologies used to implement a cloud are highly relevant in any case. It's very common to have needs that are well met by a virtualized server slice or a segregated piece of diskstore.

That said, Sturgeon's Law applies thoroughly to the cloud, and the 90% includes all the marketing and corporate statements.

Re:sorry, but nothing changed

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets say you're a medieval manager in charge of providing email service to the biz.

FTFY

Shocking

[Anonymous Coward]

Because I really was looking forward to putting all my mission critical inhouse infrastructure into someone elses control.

Re:Shocking

[ackthpt]

Because I really was looking forward to putting all my mission critical inhouse infrastructure into someone elses control.

Welllll... there's always Wikileaks.

They seem capable of weathering the worst the world can throw at them.

Laugh

[koan]

Yet another duh moment in technology.

Unless you are very, very careful

[ackthpt]

"Cloud" is today's "Snake oil"

Re:Unless you are very, very careful

[mounthood]

"Cloud" is today's "Snake oil"

No, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is todays snake oil. "Cloud" is just an amalgamation of business models that haven't been sorted out yet.

Re:Unless you are very, very careful

[ackthpt]

"Cloud" is today's "Snake oil"

No, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is todays snake oil. "Cloud" is just an amalgamation of business models that haven't been sorted out yet.

Which makes it all the more easy for people to add "Cloud" to anything they are selling, to give it that sexy appeal of being on the cusp of exciting* new technology. I'm getting loads of junk mail about how to make Cloud Technology work for me. Really? So far none of the sales pitches sount close to anything I actually need (or could use, considering the sensitivity of the data I work with.)

*Exciting: May involve intense panic, screaming, hair pulling, catastrophic failure and/or aportionment of blame.

Re:Unless you are very, very careful

[Swanktastic]

Cloud means outsourcing and not much else. Departments don't choose to outsource themselves, so it's not terribly surprising that this isn't happening quickly.

Re:Unless you are very, very careful

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I think you're wrong about SEO. The trouble is that there are plenty of people who do peddle SEO in a way that is snake-oilish, as if there's some silver bullet that will magically get your unknown small company to the top of Google's rankings. That's nonsense of course, but many small companies who get their founder's dad's neighbour's kid to design the site either don't get the basics in place or do something that actively harms their ranking because Google penalises that behaviour (ironically often a result of some shady technique that was advocated by the snake-oil SEO salesmen last week). Perhaps "competence" would be a better term than "optimization", because a lot of it is just common sense and not doing anything actively bad, but so many web sites are incompetently designed that you can definitely gain an advantage just by not doing anything wrong, and to that extent SEO is a useful and legitimate goal.

As for the cloud, I've been arguing -- since before it was even called by that name -- that shoving everything onto external resources like that has serious disadvantages for a lot of organisations. I think what most of these organisations are actually looking for is a way to reduce the absurd overheads of deploying and maintaining software across their entire network and/or a way to centralise and standardise their infrastructure. You could achieve those goals just as well by running your own mini-datacentre(s) with a whole bunch of virtualised servers and running web-based applications on those instead.

However, there will be a lot of resistance to supporting this model from the kind of companies that provide "cloud" services. For one thing, they are making a fortune doing relatively little, and will continue to do so as long as they can peddle their software as a service you pay for on subscription rather than a one-off purchase. For another thing, they can keep all their source code in-house where customers can't rip it off (or see how bad it is). Because a lot of the programming tools that are commonly used for server-side web work are quite easily reverse engineered or executed directly from the original source code, there are going to be concerns -- and possibly legitimate ones, not just hiding bad work -- about giving the entire package to customers to install on their own servers.

I do think there is going to be a big window, probably starting in a year or two, for software businesses that support this model to make serious profits. I think someone will realise that they can turn the ability for customers to host in-house for better security and reliability into a competitive advantage, bring in reasonable revenues from charging business-scale prices for software up-front even if it's only a one-off fee, and crucially, probably convert a lot of the "losses" from no longer operating subscription-based SaaS into an alternative revenue stream from providing genuine ongoing support and customisation, which is what "enterprise" software companies have done for years anyway and isn't (IMHO) the real reason they're losing out to these new-fangled cloud-based services today.

They did not target startups and small business

[dstates]

Everyone wants to keep their data close to their chest, but only the Feds and Fortune 500 companies have the resources to actually do it. For a startup or small business, cloud services are a god send. Compared to the costs of building a data center and staffing an IT department, a good cloud provider gets you up instantly and expands seamlessly. Harris targeted the wrong audience and/or they could not compete with Amazon.

Re:They did not target startups and small business

[ackthpt]

Everyone wants to keep their data close to their chest, but only the Feds and Fortune 500 companies have the resources to actually do it. For a startup or small business, cloud services are a god send. Compared to the costs of building a data center and staffing an IT department, a good cloud provider gets you up instantly and expands seamlessly. Harris targeted the wrong audience and/or they could not compete with Amazon.

Harris doesn't mess around with Mom & Pop unless Mom & Pop are producing something for DoD or have some other very well connected, essential work.

Re:They did not target startups and small business

[alphatel]

Harris targeted the wrong audience and/or they could not compete with Amazon.

You've nailed the main talking point. Cloud was where you went as an enterprise to get your data stored globally with access from anywhere. But as the internet has evolved, attacks on hosted solutions, both illegal (anonymous) and legal (feds, riaa, etc), have made jurisdiction and prudence competing factors.

If you're a startup you have none of these concerns - you're probably happy if you can find enough money to buy your best client lunch. Once you evolve from the penniless framework you, like every other growth business, will reinvest into locally stored/colocated data inside your infrastructure and outside prying fingers.

Re:They did not target startups and small business

[hjf]

Why would a startup or small busines need more processing power or data storage than a Core i7 or a 4TB HDD can offer?

Re:They did not target startups and small business

[Anonymous Coward]

It cracks me up when startups want Sharepoint and Exchange and centralized messaging and a remote app server so they can work from home as well as in the office where they've got 4 PEOPLE sitting around on COUCHES.

So yes, I also ask why.

Re:They did not target startups and small business

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you going to do with that processing power? Run it off a Cable Modem / DSL Line? Might be adequate to a small number of people, but generally?

Re:They did not target startups and small business

[tlhIngan]

Harris doesn't mess around with Mom & Pop unless Mom & Pop are producing something for DoD or have some other very well connected, essential work.

Perhaps they should've targeted that market. They could be the cloud provider AND escrow service. If Mom and Pop working for DoD goes tits up, the servers are available for the DoD to continue research. If they go rogue, the evidence is on the servers.

Harris could go after the secure hosting angle as well - the Feds can maintain their own data center, but can the various small contractors? DoD could simply mandate that data be stored in a certain fashion with escrow and Harris could be one of the few providers offering such security services.

DoD contractors required to store all the data "in a secured cloud provider escrowed to the DoD".

Re:They did not target startups and small business

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction: Might be adequate for the vast majority of non-content-hosting businesses.

Re:They did not target startups and small business

[Rakishi]

There's the ones hosting websites, the ones proving api based web services, the ones providing data analysis services, the one providing data hosting services. Actually any startup that isn't using Big Data (tm) to get extra attention is going to have issues nowadays.

Then there's the ones who care about not losing data, care about up time, care about scalability and so on.

Not to mention time, dealing with AWS virtual servers is so much easier than a physical server. Cloning an actual server takes time, money and effort.Cloning a AWS server takes a few clicks.

Of course there's also costs, collocating isn't cheap and you still need a third party to do backups with. Not to mention that cloud charges per month while having your own server is an upfront cost. Starups aim to have more later instead of now.

Re:They did not target startups and small business

[hjf]

What are you going to do with that processing power? Run it off a Cable Modem / DSL Line? Might be adequate to a small number of people, but generally?

Generally you have an office and a LAN. A small company, by definition, doesn't have worldwide presence, and if they do, they still don't usually need huge amounts of bandwidth to serve thousands of users.

And if you mean a startup that sells a web service or something, they can do what we've been doing for almost 20 years: buy hosting or housing space. It doesn't need to be all "cloud". Small companies DO NOT need a world-class datacenter.

Re:They did not target startups and small business

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure it is... It just costs more and it does not provide dedicated CPU, hard drive resources, or availability of a true load balanced environment with DR. Its the wrong choice for a small business with light to moderate traffic spikes.

Re:They did not target startups and small business

[hjf]

How about real-world companies? Like law firms, muffin shops, NGOs,... you know, the 99%? Because those are offered "cloud services" all the time as well.

That's the problem with cloud: there are so many cloud providers it's not economically viable anymore.

Re:They did not target startups and small business

[Rakishi]

And for them it's more reliable to use a cloud provider than to have everything on a 10 year old computer in a corner, running windows 2k with no backup options. Or a machine in some data center that no one has touched in equally long. Many people make very good money rescuing such companies from the disasters they have wrought onto themselves when those servers finally die.

It's not even that "cloud" is a new concept for such companies. Those companies have had "cloud" options for decades. Back when they required a special router modem that dialed into the "cloud" provider's servers.

Re:They did not target startups and small business

[hjf]

From my experience, you need to pay good (very good) lip service to convince them. Most don't want to pay the monthly fees (which are usually as much or even more than what they pay for internet access) and even less, the consulting and labor needed to convert them to a "serious" IT infrastructure. And by that, I mean de-warezing, de-virusing, upgrades, securing, wring, etc. Things you need to do wether you're running your stuff in the cloud or not.

Re:They did not target startups and small business

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not about the hardware but rather about the services these small businesses want as part of their business operations. For example, on a couple of high-availability configuration servers running a Core i7 CPU and dual mirrored 4TB HDD on each of these servers that small business could have authentication services, database services, electronic messaging with calendar services, remote access services, web services, etc. all for a low monthly fee, while not having to hire internal technical staff or shifting focus away from their core business competencies that earn revenue for the small business. That was a Charles Dickens sentence! ;)

Re:They did not target startups and small business

[hjf]

Windows Small Business Server.

Hugging?

[Anonymous Coward]

The word "hugging" appears no where in the fine article. Where did this stupid term come from, and what is it supposed to mean?

Re:Hugging?

[Skapare]

I've also been curious who this Anonymous Coward person is, and how he manages to hide is certainly very very low userid number.

AWS GovCloud (US) would indicate otherwise

[Anonymous Coward]

http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/

AWS GovCloud (US)

AWS GovCloud is an AWS Region designed to allow US government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. Previously, government agencies with data subject to compliance regulations such as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which governs how organizations manage and store defense-related data, were unable to process and store data in the cloud that the federal government mandated be accessible only by US persons. Because AWS GovCloud is physically and logically accessible by US persons only, government agencies can now manage more heavily regulated data in AWS while remaining compliant with strict federal requirements. The new Region offers the same high level of security as other AWS Regions and supports existing AWS security controls and certifications such as FISMA, SAS-70, ISO 27001, FIPS 140-2 compliant end points, and PCI DSS Level 1. AWS also provides an environment that enables agencies to comply with HIPAA regulations.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides agencies and businesses with an infrastructure web services platform in the cloud. With AWS you can requisition compute, storage, and other services–gaining access to a suite of secure, scalable, and flexible IT infrastructure services as your agency or business demands them. With AWS, you pay only for what you use, making AWS the most cost-effective way to deliver your applications.

Re: AWS GovCloud (US) would indicate otherwise

[dcraid]

Some companies know how to do Cloud. Old school GSIs don't.

About damn Time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing to do with hugging, trust, or any of that. Everything to do with Harris's incompetence, mismanagement, and downright stupidity.

Couldn't say I am shocked nor upset.

anon.

Re:About damn Time.

[Skapare]

They just wanted to get in on a new business model that turns out to be a dud. Looks like someone with enough cash can buy a ready-built data center for (relatively) cheap. What it would be useful for is unknown. Google and Facebook build their own, their own way (likely a whole lot better).

Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Limited on-site bandwidth with (usually) slower upload speeds and monthly caps by greedy ISPs. Then they wonder why off-site "clouds" aren't popular.

Dumbasses, look at the whole chain before dreaming up shit.

I am surprised and not surprised

[erroneus]

This seemingly popular push to "cloud computing" had everyone bouncing... seemed that way didn't it? But I'm guessing they were simply pushing a lot of hype and when it came down for business people to sign, they asked "you want me to put my data where? It's not on my servers or under my control? And you want me to sign something that says you're not responsible if something happens?!"

Re:I am surprised and not surprised

[vlm]

And you want me to sign something that says you're not responsible if something happens?!

That's the key to how cloud was mismanaged by the cloud providers:

Cloud = no responsibility at all and you're in a long term contractual relationship you cannot escape from and due to downsizing you don't have the technical skills to dig yourself out of the hole without $200/hr consultants.

Inhouse = 100% total instant personal responsibility or you get fired and replaced next week by another H1B or another recent grad noob who CAN do it.

Cloud wanted the long term cell phone contract business model. Business wanted the customer of commodity gas station model. Cloud got flushed. Oh well.

Another way to put it is businesses don't like employees who moonlight simply because they can't be stressed out as much as employees who only get one paycheck... and cloud is an outsourced employee with thousands of paychecks who simply doesn't care if you fire him. Thats not conducive to the kind of abusive relationship management desires...

The Frog and the Scorpion

[Gothmolly]

So this company, likely founded by someone with a buddy in governement, built a new DC that was supposed to get filled by governement servers, and now because the wind shifted they're caught with their pants down?

Zero sympathy. You tried to cash in on a buzzword, and worse, you hooked your wagon up to the governement. Try a real business model next time.

Re:The Frog and the Scorpion

[Anonymous Coward]

So this company, likely founded by someone with a buddy in governement, built a new DC that was supposed to get filled by governement servers, and now because the wind shifted they're caught with their pants down?

Zero sympathy. You tried to cash in on a buzzword, and worse, you hooked your wagon up to the governement. Try a real business model next time.

LDAP, Java, .NET, Social Networking, etc. all buzzwords at one point.
Greater than ~70-80% of the business done in the US is either directly or indirectly done with the U.S. government....hence the reason conservatives/libertarian politicians rail against government spending unless it of course it has anything to do with needless subsidies to their coporate task masters.

Re:The Frog and the Scorpion

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you even do any research on the company or just jump to conclusions? Or read the article?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris_Corporation

I think they have a real business model

Re:The Frog and the Scorpion

[grumble_grumble]

Actually it started off as a printing press company in 1895. I don't think they really got into government stuff for the first 80-90 years. That said, I have seen tons o' fail built upon the direction of some CEO or exec level 'leader' that read just enough buzz words in the latest wall street journal or Wired to be dangerous. Cloud computing, virtualization, SOA, web services, OOP. All can have brilliant uses but the problem is that those with a limited understanding of the technology embrace it and want to apply it to everything under the sun. Is your raid SOA compliant? Have you looked into virtualizing your furniture? Sounds silly but you'd be surprised.

Re:The Frog and the Scorpion

[Anonymous Coward]

are you that stupid? Harris is a 100 year old 5 billion $/year company. ONE contract was this:
  Aug 26, 2004
The National Reconnaissance Office has chosen Harris Corp. to provide operations, maintenance and support services for the agency's global communications and information systems, the company announced today.
NRO, which is part of the 14-agency intelligence community, designs, builds and operates the nation's reconnaissance satellites, providing the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Department and other federal agencies with information.
Under the terms of the contract, Harris Technical Services Corp. will provide communications and IT services at NRO locations worldwide. The contract has a base period of three years, with three option years and four award-term years, and a potential value of $1 billion over the potential 10-year life.

and you call it "So this company, likely founded by someone with a buddy in governement" You have a mouth but not brain. a 10second google would have told you who harris was and why their dumping cloud for the fed govt was significant.

Re:The Frog and the Scorpion

[Anonymous Coward]

Harris employs 8,000 engineers, most all with masters degrees, many with PhD's. It currently does $5billion/yr with the federal government. Buzz words are for moron kids on slashdot.

Re:The Frog and the Scorpion

[unencode200x]

Citation please.

I live in Virginia - Northern Virginia that is

[ACK!!]

This is not surprising at all. A lot of government agencies do a lot of business with companies all around this region. It says to me that even in the government agencies there are IT people with bosses that get really excited over the idea of the newest hottest tech like "Cloud Services".
They talk to a lot of companies and get them all worked up that their agency will be moving to this new tech very soon.
Companies spend on the new tech with every indication that 4 or 5 people inside of big agencies will be moving that way very soon.
That is about the time the tech people in the agency present their powerpoint presentations on the promise of cloud technology to their upper bosses.
The upper bosses look at giving their data to someone else and they look at wikileaks and they think about the benefits and downsides and keep their data and servers close to their chest.
To all the asshats who wanted government to be run like a business ? They do run things now a lot like a large clueless fumbling business. You were thinking GE and look they work like a business kind of like a Worldcomm or an Enron.

Re:I live in Virginia - Northern Virginia that is

[ackthpt]

This is not surprising at all. A lot of government agencies do a lot of business with companies all around this region. It says to me that even in the government agencies there are IT people with bosses that get really excited over the idea of the newest hottest tech like "Cloud Services".

They talk to a lot of companies and get them all worked up that their agency will be moving to this new tech very soon.

Companies spend on the new tech with every indication that 4 or 5 people inside of big agencies will be moving that way very soon.

That is about the time the tech people in the agency present their powerpoint presentations on the promise of cloud technology to their upper bosses.

The upper bosses look at giving their data to someone else and they look at wikileaks and they think about the benefits and downsides and keep their data and servers close to their chest.

To all the asshats who wanted government to be run like a business ? They do run things now a lot like a large clueless fumbling business. You were thinking GE and look they work like a business kind of like a Worldcomm or an Enron.

Having been in these situations in the past, the reality which often asserts itself is when the Manglement gets some actual feed back on actual use of these things -- when they see there's cost but negligible benefit, they scrap it

There's also the prospect of the adoption curve, some people jump on the bandwagon right off and going through all the pain and suffering (or actually become big players because it turns out well *cough* internet *cough* and they have a solid presence established before the old guard get around to it.) Keep in mind banks were very, very slow and highly cautious about embracing the internet for internet banking -- with good reason as it turns out (too bad they didn't exercise that kind of sense on mortgages) as electronic theft is easy, can steal a lot and do it very fast.

Not necessarily...

[mekkab]

just because they offer it, doesn't mean it's completely profitable. And it's possible it's being subsidized by their normal cloud offerings.

Rememeber ASP's back in the 1990's?

[alen]

Application Service Providers? those guys running Windows NT 4 Terminal Services edition where you had virtual desktops to run MS Office over the slow ass internet of the time? those same guys that failed and their EMC SAN's were on Ebay for 1/5 the new cost?

Same with cloud services

they are only worth it if you're a small start up or mom and pop. if you're a fortune 1000 or someone else with a data center built then why wipe out the investment you already made?

if you're a big company price out how much amazon costs. by the time you pay for the super servers, all the data and backups it's a lot more than buying yourself.

Re:Rememeber ASP's back in the 1990's?

[Anonymous Coward]

holy 1990s attitude. Cloud services are not about virtualized hosting or ASP models. It is about the cloud as the new OS platform with geographic diversity (global data centers) and unlimited resource scalability. Only for mom and pops.. seriously. WTF do you think powers hotmail, or icloud. It certainly isn't dedicated infrastructure. To take advantage of the cloud you have to develop for the cloud, not develop for your desktop or server rack and simply copy it into the cloud. If all you want is virtual infrastructure, call rackspace or one of the many other hosting centers that have been able to do that for over a decade (remember the dot com bubble).

Look at Microsofts PAaS (Platform As a Service) offering if you want a glimpse of the right direction (I know, MS, who would have guessed). It will come full circle to offer a similar programmable topology to the average desktop today. OS considerations go out the window because you are programming against the surface of the cloud, not any particular underlying OS. Tasks become a major enabler in the cloud when they are built for the cloud and run directly by the cloud, not by some OS snapshot that has been uploaded into the cloud. Scalability truly becomes instantaneous, and granularity of monitoring/control/deployment is much better than the typical server environment.

Harris (Joyent, Rackspace, Amazon to some extent) are just examples of how not to create a cloud offering. There are some interesting startups in this space and some interesting new technologies poised to take advantage of the cloud just around the corner, but until then, try to get on a Microsoft TAP program and check out what they are working on in the background, truly useful tools/services and the first useful solution for cloud computing (PAaS).

The Story Is Obviously "Paid For" Damage Control

[theshowmecanuck]

This guy is trying to protect his company and himself from investors who should rightly be judging them as less than competent, seeing as how they are supposed to be good judges of the worth of technological innovation. Gee, who would have thought that businesses DON"T trust 'the cloud' for data integrity and security? I like (sarcasm) this bunch of bullshit:

"As this market evolves, it's also becoming clearer that customers don't place additional value on trust and are unwilling to move the most mission-critical applications to the cloud before less-sensitive applications are thoroughly tested and vetted in a cloud environment," Brown added.

Bull shit has been called on the highest order, since he counters his own statement, calling himself a liar before the sentence is even finished. And then there is this:

"But it's becoming clear that customers, both government and commercial, currently have a preference for on-premise versus off-premise solutions."

And the final nail in the "This press release is to cover our asses and hopefully prevent me from losing my job like I should" horseshit parade:

Harris will instead focus on providing secure networks and cloud solutions for customers on their own premises. "These actions allow us to refocus our capital and efforts on the secure, cost-effective communications and IT solutions that our customers are demanding," said Brown.

Cloud solutions on their own premises. Riiiiight. Kind of like an "anti-cloud cloud," is that it? Yeah, that's the ticket. The next buzzword: The Anti-Cloud Cloud. This Brown guy sounds like all 'big thinkers' who don't have time for details: the old boys club who just happen to network really well. Heaven forbid they actually have to understand the core concepts around their business and what their potential customers actually need in order to make decisions. Instead he seems to be focusing on what he can sell them. Fire this buzzword-happy dipshit's ass and let him go back to the used car lot. Sigh... and even if they do, he'll still get a settlement package orders of magnitude more than what most people will earn in their lifetimes. Too bad there isn't a way to do more to offset that kind of crap too.

First rule of computer security.

[Karmashock]

Physical security.

That's why software piracy is so easy... the pirate has the software... and while the agency or company might "trust" some third party there's nothing like having it on site.

I know exactly how this went down... the idea was pitched to the agencies and companies... company IT said "kiss security good bye"... and all the companies and agencies got cold feet.

Re:First rule of computer security.

[randomencounter]

Also known as the "screwdriver rule".

I'm really surprised to see the first mention of it this far down in the comments. What are they teaching the kids these days?

Re:First rule of computer security.

[Karmashock]

A lot of people don't have respect for old rules. They think the world is new and they don't apply... failing to grasp that the old rules are the ones that have survived repeated challenges. They're the old gladiators still walking around after 100,000 battles in the arena. Could they be wrong now?... Sure... who wants to get into the arena and be the 100,001 test case that changes everything?

Exactly... the old rules tend to be ones that not only are valid today but will be valid in 10,000 years. They're elemental.

Re:First rule of computer security.

[Anonymous Coward]

With encryption and authentication services enabled on the virtualized cloud environment of a client, only the client should have access to the actual data while the cloud services provider can access the services (email server but not the mailstore content, database server but not the data therein, etc.). Backups of data would be simply a matter of copying the encrypted data while the public key / private key management is under the control of the client whose data is being backed up. The model of cloud computing could work if the right decisions are made.

American hosting, fuck no!

[Anonymous Coward]

Host data on servers in a country where the Department of Homeland Fucking Security, an agency formed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to combat terrorism and threats against America, shuts down websites for copyright infringement? Yeah, let's pass on that.

Successive Democratic and Republic administrations appear to be working to drive hosting overseas. As the population of Internet users overseas grows, where does this leave the United States? Why should anyone with the option to host elsewhere rely on data hosting subject to undisclosed snooping by the Feds? How can any company sell reliability when the Federal Government can so easily shut operations down? Fuck it, either host it in-house, in which case the company in question will at least know about the snooping when a bunch of cunts in black SUVs arrive on their doorstep. Also, data hosted en masse is more likely to get caught as collateral damage when the feds come blundering in to confiscate or shut-down sites. Safer to host it yourself, knowing that your data aren't cohabiting with anything the Feds could possibly find interesting, which these days is pretty much anything. Hosting in the US becomes unrealistic with such blunt force being used with so little accountability. As a policy supported by both sides of the house, I see no reason for it to change anytime soon.

Re:The Story Is Obviously "Paid For" Damage Contro

[purplebear]

Just as an FYI, Brown is new to Harris. The former CEO left shortly after the data center was functional. He actually went out on top of bringing Harris up to a $6B+ company.
Not defending anyone here, just giving some information. Brown could not possibly be responsible for this blunder.

With that said, I thought the idea was a little crazy to begin with when Harris wouldn't even put less critical data into a 3rd party providers hands, even with sensitivity guarantees. So, why would their government services division think the government would do it with more critical data?

Cloud hosting is nonsend

[Kimomaru]

Every five years or so people hem and hawe about remote service hosting and storage. In the late 90s everyone in the MS Exchange industry was considering remote hosting their groupware. Went no where. Then the new thing was co-hosting telecom. Went no where. In fact, remote-hosting is a good solution when an organization is small, but as soon as it starts to grow it becomes unmanageable. There ARE some examples where remote-hosting in large organizations that make sense, like Arizona State University's move from local IMAP servers to hosting on Gmail, or ASU's remote-hosting of Telecom with Century Link instead of running local CallManager servers - but the cost of these moves are easily dwarfed by the benefits as ASU can recognize the significant cost savings and the SLAs in education can be different than in other industries.

Re:The Story Is Obviously "Paid For" Damage Contro

[theshowmecanuck]

Apologies to Brown then.

Told you so

[Anonymous Coward]

When I said the cloud was hype, people made fun of me.

Re:Told you so

[KlomDark]

This!

So is this stupid cloud fad about over now? About time... Been sick of hearing about it since the beginning.

Re:Told you so

[jc42]

So is this stupid cloud fad about over now?

Nah; it'll probably hang on for a while yet. And in the long run, it'll probably be around for a long time, though on a much smaller scale than its pushers were hoping for. This is because there are some very good uses for it. If you have stuff that you want to be easily available to lots of people wherever they are (with Net access), and you don't particularly mind if non-subscribers get access to some of your stuff, then the Cloud can be really useful.

I have a number of things online that I don't mind people using. My resume, for instance. And a lot of "demo" software that's public to show people what I can do. I've also got improvements to some of my stuff from other people who downloaded something, found that it didn't do something they wanted, added the code, and sent me the patches. There's a lot of stuff like this that's useful but not really profitable, so you might as well share it. And if you don't have to connect to a server 37 hops away to get at it when you're off somewhere remote, so much the better. Storing it redundantly on scattered servers might be very handy for you and your friends.

But I wouldn't expect a lot of business use of the Cloud. Businesses always consider their data Top Secret (even if nobody else gives a damn about it). All it takes is a manager realizing that everything in the Cloud has to be treated as "public", and they'll run away screaming. Similar in government agencies, which are mostly indistinguishable from businesses when it comes to information about their internal workings.

There's also the problem of Cloud providers claiming ownership of useful things they find on their servers, but that's a different topic that we've already discussed a few times here on slashdot. Suffice it to say that if you want to retain ownership of useful software (or your music or medical records or photos of your children), you don't want it stored on someone else's computers. Marketers see such stuff as tools to be used in their own business.

Re:Told you so

[arkane1234]

No worries, Cloud 2.0 will be out soon...

WTF is server hugging?

[loshwomp]

There is no mention of that term anywhere in the article. How about posting headlines in plain English?

Re:WTF is server hugging?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Server Hugging" = "You can pry my servers from my cold, dead hands".

The two reasons why agencies aren't outsourcing to "cloud" providers: IT depts want to retain their fiefs (and budgets) and security: good luck trying to pass a C&A audit using the "It's all in the cloud" defense.

XKCD nicely summarizes "The Cloud"

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/908/ ...gotta love branding. Call it a "Cloud Server", make it synonyms with "secured data", and watch the sheep flock fill your company's bank account! ~_~

Re:XKCD nicely summarizes "The Cloud"

[turbidostato]

"and watch the sheep flock fill your company's bank account! "

And there you made a point *in favour* of "Tha Cloud": where's your bank account? It is your damn money, for christ's sake! Don't tell me you passed the control of your dear money to a third party, don't tell you don't take of your dear money on premises.

If an external company can be your money's custodian, certainly an external company can be the custodian of your company's data.

Re:The Story Is Obviously "Paid For" Damage Contro

[theshowmecanuck]

Now that I think of it.... fuck Brown.... he is the one lying about shit and playing spin doctor. I have to learn not to be so nice. :p

where in the cloud?

[luis_a_espinal]

What are you going to do with that processing power? Run it off a Cable Modem / DSL Line? Might be adequate to a small number of people, but generally?

Generally you have an office and a LAN. A small company, by definition, doesn't have worldwide presence, and if they do, they still don't usually need huge amounts of bandwidth to serve thousands of users.

And if you mean a startup that sells a web service or something, they can do what we've been doing for almost 20 years: buy hosting or housing space. It doesn't need to be all "cloud". Small companies DO NOT need a world-class datacenter.

Like in Heroku, or on RackSpace or Amazon EC2?

Re:The Story Is Obviously "Paid For" Damage Contro

[tqk]

This guy is trying to protect his company and himself from investors who should rightly be judging them as less than competent ...

... customers don't place additional value on trust ...

When I read this before, I thought he was talking about security when he said "trust." Now I see he was attempting to rely on Harris' reputation.

Holy !@#$!

If I worked somewhere that Harris had done work for in the past, I'd be sending letters around to all dept's asking for critical evaluations of Harris' work. What was it, does it work, what's it cost to maintain it, is it reliable/cost effective, would you recommend them for future projects (why or why not), ...

200m seems low

[Anonymous Coward]

having put together boms for quite a few enterprise infrastructure build outs 200m seems a bit low?

The "Cloud" is just a modern rehash of timesharing

[Lawrence_Bird]

For those old enough to remember it, this is just a more sophisticated time sharing system. Which undoubtedly has some advantages for some customers/users. But unlike days past, there is little sense of security concerning not just the survival of the companies involved, but survival of your data and business plans. What is your fall back if you move everything to the cloud? Apologies to the ladies, but yes thats you standing their with your dick in your hand trying to figure out how to recreate your own IT solution. And given the current environment where security either takes a back burner or is just difficult to guaranty, who are you going to go down with? The Cloud provider or your own shop that you have control over?

Cloud was always just hype

[The123king]

Apart from things like Dropbox, I have never met anyone who has fully embraced cloud computing and storage. I currently own a Mac, but have no intention of using iCloud, as I, as many of my friends and collegues do, believe in keeping our own personal data on our own personal machines.

I have always seen cloud computing to be a rather hyped up without and real take-up on the market. I can see cloud computing being a bubble, with it about to pop in a few years time.

Re:Cloud was always just hype

[SecurityGuy]

And good riddance when it does. It's a massive distraction as people who should know better go chasing after the latest silver bullet.

Data security

[Smertrios]

The issue I have with "Cloud" computing, besides it becoming the latest buzz word and craze, is the security concerns. To my knowledge none of the cloud services comply with any of the security regulations. With that said how many small organizations are using google for email or documents that contain medical information or other regulated items that have strict policies on how personal information is handled?

Re:Data security

[dcraid]

Google, Amazon, and Salesforce have been FISMA certified for government use: http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/09/amazon-cloud-earns-fisma-government-security-accreditation.ars http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/government/trust.html http://www.businesscloud9.com/content/salesforcecom-goes-washington/5527

Fed Server Hugging

[Anonymous Coward]

My first thought upon reading the caption was of somebody hugging a happily fed server. Which I guess is probably a much safer proposition than a hugging a voraciously hungry server....