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?

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

[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: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.

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

[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.

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: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.