Microsoft To Offer Governments Local Version of Azure Cloud Service (reuters.com)

Microsoft on Monday said it will soon make it possible for government clients to run its cloud technology on their own servers as part of a concerted effort to make Azure more appealing to local and federal agencies. From a report: The pairing of Azure Stack, Microsoft's localized cloud product, and Azure Government, the government-tailored version of Microsoft's cloud, comes as competition against Amazon.com Inc for major clients in the public sector ramps up. The new offering, which will be made available in mid-2018, is designed to appeal to governments and agencies with needs for on-premise servers, such as in a military operation or in an embassy abroad, said Tom Keane, Microsoft Azure's head of global infrastructure.

Comments

A locally hosted cloud solution?

[jellomizer]

All the expense of hosting it locally, with the vendor lock in of a cloud solution!

Re:A locally hosted cloud solution?

[Kenneth Stephen]

This is being misunderstood, because the traditional purchasing model is not the way they government wants to purchase software any more - at least within the DOD. DISA - the IT arm of the Dept. of Defense, has bought into the cloud movement wholesale. One of the benefits that the cloud brings to them is that software - once sold as SaaS, becomes opex, instead of capex. This means that when they put out requirements for software, they will ask for the entire SaaS stack - down to the compute, storage, and networking, to be provided as part of the bid. The only caveat is that quite often, all of this has to run on DOD premises, or DOD accredited premises. Both Amazon, and IBM have the ability to run a private cloud on premise, and could respond to RFPs like this. Microsoft was missing out on multi-million dollar bids because they didn't have a private cloud offering till now.

Given that the DOD _wants_ a local hosted solution, there is nothing net new about the expense of it being hosted locally. With a cloud / SaaS model though, the DOD can now walk away from a vendor if they chose to, at will. So, the hosting cost will be baked into the price of the service, but the depreciation will be owned by the Cloud Provider. The DOD wins because it can be nimble ("oh - you want to add 5000 more users as users of service X? No problem, we just provision more users in the system. It will be ready in two days"), scaleable ("Oh there is a war breaking out? No problem, our cloud platform can scale up and meet the additional load"), and modern (because the software will have to be maintained _by the vendor_ in an evergreen state). And the SaaS / Cloud provider wins because they get $$$$ from the government.