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Microsoft Wins A Big Cloud Deal With America's Intelligence Community (spokesman.com)
wyattstorch516 shared this story from the AP: Microsoft Corp. said it's secured a lucrative cloud deal with the intelligence community that marks a rapid expansion by the software giant into a market led by Amazon.com Inc. The deal, which the company said Wednesday is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, allows 17 intelligence agencies and offices to use Microsoft's Azure Government, a cloud service tailored for federal and local governments, in addition to other products Microsoft already offers, such as its Windows 10 operating system and word processing programs.
The cloud agreement gives Microsoft more power to make its case to the Pentagon as it goes up against competitors like International Business Machines Corp., Oracle Corp. and Amazon for the agency's winner-take-all cloud computing contract for up to 10 years.
That contract is expected to be worth billions of dollars, according to the article, adding that "the Defense Department has said it intends to move the department's technology needs -- 3.4 million users and 4 million devices -- to the cloud to give it a tactical edge on the battlefield and strengthen its use of emerging technologies."
One Microsoft executive said this week's deal reinforces "the fact that we are a solid cloud platform that the federal government can put their trust in."
The cloud agreement gives Microsoft more power to make its case to the Pentagon as it goes up against competitors like International Business Machines Corp., Oracle Corp. and Amazon for the agency's winner-take-all cloud computing contract for up to 10 years.
That contract is expected to be worth billions of dollars, according to the article, adding that "the Defense Department has said it intends to move the department's technology needs -- 3.4 million users and 4 million devices -- to the cloud to give it a tactical edge on the battlefield and strengthen its use of emerging technologies."
One Microsoft executive said this week's deal reinforces "the fact that we are a solid cloud platform that the federal government can put their trust in."
In other news, CA closed a multi-million dollar deal with a customer who can't bother to do the work internally to prove that they no longer use CA software anywhere and so just agreed to pay whatever they were asked. This week's deal reinforces "the fact that we are a solid cloud platform that the federal government can put their trust in."
Just wait till they all get BSOD'd or have to keep re-booting.
Let me guess-
It'll be kind of like the inverse of when the Brits cracked Enigma- they let some bad stuff happen to not give away that they'd cracked the code, and not tipping off their adversaries meant that they could continue to decipher all the messages and avoid the very worst stuff.
The tactical advantage here will be small leaks (courtesy of Meltdown and Spectre and whatever else we haven't heard of yet) that are true and the occasional huge leak that's a ruse.
Are Oracle and IBM even in a competition for "cloud" services? Their offerings are just legacy hosted servers wrapped with a fuckton of poorly trained people.
...Is like putting Dracula in charge of blood-bank security.
WCPGW?
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
We also have cloud Eh Aye in Canada, eh?
#DeleteFacebook
Presumably that includes the US military.
Getting a real handle on this is a hard task because of the web of contractors, subcontractors, and direct employees spread across a bunch of different agencies. DOD has 1.3 million active duty personnel plus 0.8 million in the National Gaurd and Reserve plus 0.7 million civilian employees. That's direct employees. For contractors it's anybody's guess. Just getting a headcount would cost million$. For scale, the US labor force is ~150 million people. So roughly one employed person in sixty works directly for the DOD. If you /ass/ume a 1:1 FTE/Contractor ratio then that's one in thirty.
War is big business.
I wonder how much personal data of Microsoft's customer has to be handed over in the deal.
After all, the Microsoft's cloud infrastructure runs on Linux.
for free. MS would never landed something like this without that. But anybody sane already knows you cannot trust the cloud in any way anyways, so it does not make a lot of difference.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Lots of these "deals" are payoffs for the continued (backroom) cooperation Microsoft and others provide.
Looks like they're following their time-honored strategy of embrace, extend, and eavesdrop
One trusted worker can watch a lot of people. The US has a lot of people who can watch.
"5.1 million Americans have security clearances. That’s more than the entire population of Norway." (March 24, 2014)
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
"Who has security clearance? More than 4.3M people" (June 6, 2017 )
https://www.usatoday.com/story...
Nearly 5 Million People Have Government Security Clearances (07.23.12)
https://www.wired.com/2012/07/...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Use our cloud service - we give access to all our users' telemetry data for free!
>> the cloud to give it a tactical edge on the battlefield
Yeah, but smoke clouds to hide your position is a WWII technology...
aaaaaaa
Good one :)
The problem is bing maps has poor coverage over North Korea for example.
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True, a cloud is never solid.
It dissipates and disappears over time, just when you need it the most, leaving you outside in the rain.
aaaaaaa
Microsoft Sucks! It always works OK, with other Microsoft products, but is always just a little broken with non MS products. It used to FUD (Fear Uncertainty Doubt), EEE (Embrace Extend Extinguish), But it has always been not work the other product and still is. What is is Microsoft going to break in the government? There is no privacy from MS.