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Feds: We Need Priority Access To Cloud Resources

Posted by samzenpus on from the get-to-the-back-of-the-line dept.

New submitter BButlerNWW writes "Federal agencies must be assured priority and uninterrupted access to public cloud resources before fully embracing the technology for national security and emergency response IT functions, a recent report finds. It recommends creating a program to develop a system to ensure federal organizations receive 'first-in-line' access to cloud-based resources during emergency situations."

9 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. How about no? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What about business continuity? What about friends, families and coworkers staying in touch? What about private companies that run CRITICAL infrastructure, like ISP data centers?

    Fuck the feds. Just because it's government employees doesn't mean that it outstrips all other considerations, bar none. They act otherwise because if they can convince enough people, they get more money and power for themselves.

    1. Re:How about no? by chrb · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This article is just anti-government spin and alarmism. It is government policy to move as much computation as possible into the *public* cloud. This report just says that the public cloud, at the moment, is probably not ready for "national security and emergency preparedness" tasks. The report goes on to give examples of some of the service level agreement requirements that would be required ("continuous monitoring of the cloud infrastructure by the provider, third-party audits, data encryption and various certifications and accreditations, including continuously evolving accreditation requirements from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program").

      Anyone arguing against this is going to have to produce a coherent rationale for using the public cloud for national security and emergency preparedness tasks, and show that public cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft will continue to operate effectively in a national security / emergency situation. Of course, "national security" is an over-broad umbrella that is used to shield too many places from the public view, but that is a another argument...

    2. Re:How about no? by hoppo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's where "federal" has become quite a misnomer. This is becoming more and more a national government.

    3. Re:How about no? by hoppo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Politicians are corrupt. This is not new. It is the reason this country was founded on the notion that government should be granted very limited power. Humans are imperfect. The original design of our system of government was based on accepting that imperfection, and limiting the power that anyone can wield.

  2. Why do they even need the cloud? by ZorinLynx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why do they need the cloud? How is the cloud better than your OWN well connected servers?

  3. Re:They have cash? by JanneM · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They can pay for first priority.

    They can, and should. I can see how access is critical, especially during events that may knock out parts of the infrastructure. Paying for the access is both fair and in spirit with the economic system they are working within.

    Of course, if they do so, some people will immediately point to their cost structure, compare it to the price paid by a novelty item manufacturer for hte same resources (minus any guarantees) and promptly declare that govermnent is inept, corrupt and wasting money.

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  4. Here's an idea... by SQL+Error · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Don't use the cloud for national security and emergency response functions.

    Problem solved.

  5. cloud in the government by sageres · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I work for a government agency (not going to name the name), but there has been push for the last few years to put much of our processing and data storage in the public cloud.
    How stupid. This type of stuff normally comes from the upper management whom the vendors happen to entertain on golf courses and parties every now and then (just like the vendors push any product there.) But the cloud is different. Somehow the jackets from MS, Google, IBM, HP and Oracle have execs everywhere up to the upper echelons convinced that it will save money on IT budget. By tying ourselves up into the cloud, we are allowing for 1. potential leak of information through public storage and 2. potential denial of availability to the information when such storage and/or processing center(s) become unavailable due to network outage, disasters, national emergency, etc.

  6. The article is 100% reasonable by laird · · Score: 5, Informative

    As is often the case, the headline is completely misleading. The federal government isn't demanding first priority to cloud resources.

    They are saying that they can't move national security and emergency services into public clouds until the cloud providers can give them the guaranteed uptime that they have now with dedicated servers, so they're going to keep running those services on dedicated servers. This is worth talking about in that it's an exception to the general rule that the federal government is trying to move everything to cloud providers.

    The article even notes that there are some specialized cloud providers (e.g. Terramark's Federal group) that offer a higher level SLA than the public cloud providers, specifically aimed at providing the kind of SLA required for national security and emergency services.

    Please RTFA before flaming.

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