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."

Comments

BSOD

[rojash]

Just wait till they all get BSOD'd or have to keep re-booting.

MS Hosting Defense Data

[BlueStrat]

...Is like putting Dracula in charge of blood-bank security.

WCPGW?

Strat

Re:MS Hosting Defense Data

[thegarbz]

Interesting analogy. One person who would have a lot at stake in ensuring that a blood supply is protected is the person who relies on it as food. Dracula would be most ideal in protecting blood.

Now to go back to the analogy I think you were trying to say:

a) Are you saying MS will misappropriate defence data? Care to cite a case where they have done that to an enterprise customer in the past?
b) Are you saying MS will lose or let this data get into the wrong hands? Care to cite a case where they have done that to an enterprise customer in the past?

A lot of people see their Windows boxen crash, and ransomware take over because a user clicked a dodgy link and then creatively extrapolate that to: MS cloud services are not secure or to be trusted. But I've yet to see someone actually come up with a direct reason of why.

Re:The cloud gives a tactical edge?

[DontBeAMoran]

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.

Joke's on them, I use a beowulf cluster of Commodore 64's.

Re:how many users?

[ElizabethGreene]

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.

Re:Realy? Front page news?

[wyattstorch516]

The fact that Microsoft is becoming a legitimate competitor to Amazon in the cloud space is front page news. Obviously they have a way to go to catch up but they have clearly distanced themselves from Google in cloud services.

Much more interesting when there are multiple companies competing for leadership in a tech sector.

The Citizen Lost

[c horde]

I wonder how much personal data of Microsoft's customer has to be handed over in the deal.