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Trump Administration Calls For Government IT To Adopt Cloud Services (reuters.com)
According to Reuters, The White House said Wednesday the U.S. government needs a major overhaul of information technology systems and should take steps to better protect data and accelerate efforts to use cloud-based technology. The report outlined a timeline over the next year for IT reforms and a detailed implementation plan. One unnamed cloud-based email provider has agreed to assist in keeping track of government spending on cloud-based email migration. From the report: The report said the federal government must eliminate barriers to using commercial cloud-based technology. "Federal agencies must consolidate their IT investments and place more trust in services and infrastructure operated by others," the report found. Government agencies often pay dramatically different prices for the same IT item, the report said, sometimes three or four times as much. A 2016 U.S. Government Accountability Office report estimated the U.S. government spends more than $80 billion on IT annually but said spending has fallen by $7.3 billion since 2010. In 2015, there were at least 7,000 separate IT investments by the U.S. government. The $80 billion figure does not include Defense Department classified IT systems and 58 independent executive branch agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency. The GAO report found some agencies are using systems that have components that are at least 50 years old.
Why leak data when you can let it flow like Niagara Falls? =)
Popcorn anyone? Anyone??
I think you're being too cynical. AWS GovCloud is pretty damn nice:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/latest/UserGuide/whatis.html
Helped a friend move two web apps used by the state of Washington from their Windows 2000 servers with firewalls that hadn't been touched in over a decade to it. It's most certainly more secure now with revisited firewall (Security Groups in AWS-speak) and ELB (elastic load balancer) in front of the server with no direct access to the Windows servers.
You say "cloud services", I say "time-sharing".
Big system with segmented processes and storage. They were a security nightmare. The first international conference on computer security in London in 1971 was primarily driven by the time-sharing concerns. /get off my lawn
As a result of working for DOD contractors at various times my identity information — extremely detailed identity stuff, like who I went to grade school with and every place I've ever lived and every foreign country I've ever visited — has been stolen from Federal government systems three times now. We see no end of criminality in the handling of the Federal government's electronic documents and no end to the incompetence and deliberate neglect in maintaining recoverable backups.
This Federal government you imagine of competent, conscientious and moral people that don't neglect things and don't destroy incriminating things is a fiction inside your head, and no amount of billions of dollars can ever make it real; it's broken by design. I can't see how moving the bulk of it to efficiently run and competently maintained cloud environments could do any harm, and it may well improve things in a number of ways. At the very least it may stop being trivially simple for the next Paul Combetta to doctor and erase the record.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!