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Amazon and Google Barred From UK Government Cloud

Posted by Soulskill on from the us-government-disappointed dept.

judgecorp writes "Amazon and Google both applied for a role in the U.K. government's 'G-Cloud' for public services, but were rejected, a FOI request has revealed. It is most likely this was because of concerns about where data was hosted and backed up. Amazon Web Services has a dedicated cloud service for the government in the U.S., but has not been able to duplicate that in Britain."

3 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. Why cloud? by fufufang · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why don't they run their own datacenter and have centralised IT services, rather than relying on some third party private company? Is it because they want to have someone to blame if things do go wrong?

  2. US Law Everywhere by ebonum · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If a company has any operations in the US, they are expected to follow US law worldwide. Even if the parent is in Germany and the offense occurred by a subsidiary in the Philippines, the US government has no qualms about going after their US arm. If this wasn't bad enough, it isn't always the Federal government. If the NY State attorney general thinks a foreign company has some dealings with Iran, he will not hesitate to pursue legal action.

    If I was the UK government, how would I feel about the possibility of some low level government guy in Seattle saying, I can get to everything in the UK cloud without a warrant?

    Obama administration is "arguing that you lose your property rights by storing something on a cloud computing service"
    Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/governments-attack-cloud-computing

    If you use the cloud, only do it for data you are willing to openly publish.

  3. Re:Imagine that... by isaac · · Score: 5, Informative

    And um, regarding comments on off-shoring data/services, Amazon certainly does have cloud services that run on hosts in the UK... Dublin mostly. (There may be open questions about the parent company being US-based, but those wouldn't have to do with the geographic location of the services and data, which surely would be hosted from the Dublin data centers.)

    I feel compelled to point out that Dublin, Republic of Ireland (where Amazon does indeed have datacenters) is most definitely not in the UK.

    --
    I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.