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Walmart to Vendors: Get Off Amazon's Cloud (wsj.com)
Amazon vs. Walmart saga continues. It turns out, Walmart isn't thrilled about its partners using Amazon's cloud, and it's telling them to get off it (alternative source). From a report: Walmart is telling some technology companies that if they want its business, they can't run applications for the retailer on Amazon's leading cloud-computing service, Amazon Web Services, several tech companies say. [...] Walmart, loath to give any business to Amazon, said it keeps most of its data on its own servers and uses services from emerging AWS competitors, such as Microsoft's Azure.
Azure isn't owned by a company that is in direct competition with some of Walmart's businesses. This has nothing to do with sane or cost effective business practices for their IT service vendors and everything to do with trying to leverage the fact that Walmart is the bigger player (than the vendors) to deny revenue for a competitor.
Sadly, while some are already throwing words like "monopoly" around, I suspect this is perfectly above board - these are businesses looking to provide a service *for* Walmart, not sell their products *through* Walmart. As such Walmart is perfectly entitled to specify entirely arbitrary requirements for how Walmart's data and services are provisioned such as mandating a the use of one of their preferred suppliers. If Walmart wants to pay its IT service vendors more to use Azure, Google, or whoever instead of Amazon (assuming Amazon is actually the cheaper option) that's their business, dick move or not. It is, however, probably also going to impact on their bottom line, which might be something the shareholders might want to take note of.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Walmart is a dinosaur. It is quickly going the way of the dinosaur in part because of the draconian nature of its power players, grappling with retaining their cash cow instead of doing what a REAL business - in a market economy - does...innovate. Those same, creativity stricken, power players would even be unable to work in a real 9-5 job. Sadly that is the case for most of that echelon.
Amazon just bought Whole Foods, making it a direct competitor to Walmart. So, Walmart is being sensible. They are saying they don't want any of their data on a competitor's server. Using a car analogy, it's like Toyota saying to their suppliers they don't want their data stored in the GM Cloud Service. There are no guarantees that Amazon would not snoop on the data, no matter how walled off the service is from the rest of the company. This is quite common in the industry, the suppliers are still free to do whatever they want with their own data, but they must follow directions from the customer regarding customer data. So before crying monopoly, consider whether any company would freely hand over their data for storage to a competitor.
Right on! Walmart is now the Kmart of this generation. Once a powerhouse, they refuse to change with the times and are going to be blown away by the competition that uses better ideas rather than monopolistic control. I watched Walmart overcome Kmart almost over nite because Kmart refused to change a thing about their business model when Walmart was better. This resulted in Walmart devastating Kmart. Amazon is now doing that to Walmart, and they are going to lose to the better idea.
Then go to OpenStack and be happy... (I pitched OpenStack as well, in case you did not notice).
As a matter of fact, I am a Technical trainer for, among other things, OpenStack (also, storage and servers), so, it behooves me if everyone getting out of AWS or GoogleCloud goes to OpenStack (more work, more £€¥$)...
So, no astroturfing. Just Honest opinion, I'd love evryone to go form AWS or GoogleCloud to OpenStack instead of Asure, but the reality is that not everyone can do so, or will do so
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
The cloud provider has complete access to the hypervisor, and still could access the data in memory even if it is encrypted at-rest and in-flight. If their hardware platform uses Intel's AMT or the AMD's PSP, a third party could do the same remotely. Colocated VMs could also reach the data through either VM escape or cache-based jamming agreement.
You are correct that the pain will be legal, even tho not for the cloud provider(s) but for their customers. I'm not sure about the regulation in the US, but in Europe I remain fully responsible for the confidentiality of my customer data even if I outsource the hosting to a cloud provider. And thanks to new regulation coming into force next year, my fines will be doubled if a leak happens through negligence... and deciding to host on a cloud with the issues of the previous paragraph can be construed as negligence.