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Microsoft Opens Up Azure Cloud in Germany Even It Can't Access (windowsitpro.com)
Reader v3rgEz writes: International customers are becoming increasingly concerned about the U.S.'s data snooping practices, and it appears Microsoft has devised a solution to make them happy: Set up Azure cloud in a foreign region. Because it's under the technical ownership of a German company named Deutsche Telekom, even Microsoft doesn't have access to the data. The move is not surprising, but it could set a precedent that encourages others to move their corporate data away from U.S. shores to countries that take a friendlier view of encryption and data privacy. From the official blog post, "Microsoft has -- in this new model -- no rights at all to access customer data. Only for special purpose like a support call from a customer a temporary access will be granted by the Data Trustee to the Microsoft engineer, and only for the specified area. After that time (using a technology similar to what you might know as JIT) all access is revoked automatically. So to repeat: Access is granted to the Microsoft engineer only by the Data Trustee. Microsoft has no way to grant that access to itself."
I think most people would associate JIT with Just-In-Time compilers, but I fail to see how that translates to credentialing.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Or they could just barter intelligence deals with German intelligence to have *them* hand over the information directly.
These are government intelligence agencies here. The NSA certainly could social engineer themselves the information, or induce faults on a case by case basis, but why do that when you can just cut a deal or two? The NSA has so much juicy information that German intelligence would be happy to trade for.
Sorry, what? German intelligence would never do that? Yes... sorry... I'm not laughing, that's just a lot of coughing. That's the ticket.
Comes down to can Microsoft be trusted and that answer we all know is a flat out No. Forcing people to download adware to get a security patch is flat out evil and all the tricks they have been using to get people to switch to Windows 10 is also evil. So Microsoft is a 100% untrustable and evil IMO based on those facts.
Jack of all trades,master of none
tnk1, I'm inclined to think that the worm has turned in Germany. Exposure of spying by the US on the Chancellor and other high government officials has poisoned the well. It would be a political death sentence for any politician or government employee who was caught helping the US spy on Germans.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Microsoft's betting on Azure being the next IBM mainframe-style lock in device for IT. It seems to me like their goal is to get IT people thinking in Azure terms whenever they design anything, such that it becomes one of only a couple of ways to get anything deployed. Look at Windows Server 2016 and the upcoming Azure Stack -- Microsoft is basically telegraphing that the days of an on-site server not controlled by the Azure resource manager are on the way out. I'm betting Server 2016 is one of the last "monolithic" server releases, and the rest is going to be an Azure-y collection of services that you turn on and off either in the cloud or in your own datacenter.
Given that, and given Germany's privacy laws, it makes perfect sense that they would essentially build a "Public Azure Stack" to work around that detail. Whether every single company decides they're not afraid of the public cloud or not is in question, but Microsoft's looking to control that conversation and slowly bring everyone into the ongoing monthly charges model. Makes sense too -- either collect one fee for Windows Server one time, or sell it over and over again in monthly installments forever -- the choice seems obvious!
The point is to put the servers under the control of the government which is deemed more trustworthy by the customers. And it doesn't even have to be all or most customers - just a subset. Say, those in EU.
Hopefully, there will be more similar centers opening in other countries in the future, so that customers can actually shop around, and pick the country with surveillance laws and/or track record that they're most comfortable with.