Slashdot Mirror
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.
I'm not surprised that this administration has fallen for the shiny veneer of cloud services. However, the idea that this will improve security is laughable. I agree that we need to a technological overhaul using the latest protection but cloud services are not the solution and far from the panacea they claim to be.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Sounds like a bad idea. I wonder which cloud provider wrote this directive?
The government should never use cloud services. They should by law be mandated to maintain, quite expensive hardened electronic data systems, backed up by manual, actual dead tree and pen and pencil systems. So that in the event of catastrophic failure which is inevitable, (major solar flare, impacts, extreme storm events, major geologic events et al). They can rebuild systems, this versus the idiotic lowest tenders, maximise this quarters profits, who gives a fuck what happens in a years time, so what if society suffers I have a bunker, moronic thinking. Oh look the orange orangutan likes cloud and his idiots council has been paid big time bribes so contract out to private for profit clouds. That way private corporations will control and access all government data for total control, well, right up until catastrophic failure and than a whole bunch of Americans die over years as the country slowly rebuilds. Stupid is as stupid does.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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
Recently a former co-worker told me about how his employer had migrated to cloud-based email, and federated login (and some other services). It was true that their IT infrastructure was horribly outdated, and in serious need of a complete overhaul, in order to continue meeting contractual requirements with customers.
But the way this migration was performed, was a complete failure. Over 6 months, they met NONE of their goals. Software license costs ended up being more than double what was estimated. During the migration, the login servers were compromised by a new exploit. There were several complete re-installs, and on every re-install, they found the system was infected or compromised again within minutes. They went through two "big-bang" replacements, where all systems were shut down over an extended weekend, and physical servers were replaced with the spares. As operations were halted, this costs them a huge amount of money. And the extra hours of IT and vendor service were costly. (law enforcement was also involved, and, my former co-worker tells me, there will be a lawsuit by the employees whose personal information was exfiltrated). The only real gain here, was the IT staff got good experience at disaster recovery practice.
In the end, the company's yearly numbers were completely blown. They lost customers, their reputation was damaged. They ended up cutting staff. (some of us already had a feeling that things were heading in a bad direction years ago, and left).
I really really wish that I could name names here. Not just the company but the vendors. This migration plan was announced ahead of time, and so many people drank the marketing cool aid - people who should have known better. But privately, the criticisms were flying, and exactly everything that sound reasonably thinking people said would happen, did happen.
I could go further - to the beginning of the whole "Cloud Services" craze. We've all had our doubts, and pointed out the obvious flaws. And even where a service like Amazon's QuickStart setups can supposedly configure everything to be fully secure and compliant. . . this service is deceptively over-simplified, and there are so many details that are left unspoken. Moving your IT out of your own data center to the cloud may look cheaper on paper, but shipping it to some one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter cloud service is not the answer. You're still going to need a shit ton of very skilled expertise to architect and configure it, and then you're still at risk. Because your data is not in your building under your physical control. Which is really your last line of defense when shit gets real. If you need to, you can unplug.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.