USDA Services Moving To the Microsoft Cloud 146
JoltinJoe77 writes "Not to be outdone by Google, who recently announced an e-mail deal with the GSA, Microsoft is pressing forward with a migration of its own. 'The US Department of Agriculture is ready to go live with Microsoft's cloud services. In the next four weeks, the agency will move 120,000 users to Microsoft Online services, including e-mail, Web conferencing, document collaboration, and instant messaging.'"
Very large company ... (Score:5, Insightful)
A very large company was told to use Microsoft's Azure Cloud this after a few high-up decision makers had a game of golf with some Microsoft people. Obviously, a computer server is just a computer server and since MS has some of those, it will work.
WRONG.
60,000+ servers inside that company are UNIX (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux, etc) and those programs don't run under Windows-whatever-the-name-is-this-year. When the technical architecture team got to Redmond and asked about that, the Microsoft tech guys agreed - there was no way to accomplish what was in their contract.
People that make technical decisions over golf probably shouldn't be allowed to make any decisions at all. I've seen it with other decisions at the company too. BEA was very happy after a golf game a few years ago.
BTW, the Microsoft "cloud" deployment was canned completely (not just scaled back to Windows-Servers-only). I hope that S-VP was sacked too.
Concerned... (Score:3, Insightful)
I am a bit concerned that what appears to be an entire agency moving its operations toward complete dependency on a single commercial entity. It doesn't matter if the USDA were to use Google's cloud, or anyone else's cloud. What happens when said cloud "runs out of steam" so to speak -- meaning if there are problems with the cloud itself, you've essentially got an entire agency dead in the water. At least with the current setup, there are natural stop-gaps that prevent complete technical disasters. The operations of one department theoretically would not shut down the entire agency.
There is a lot of short-sightedness in thinking that the short-term savings on IT costs will outweigh the cost of recovering from even one day of said cloud being inaccessible. Of course, I write this with absolutely no consideration for any redundancy systems that are built into the cloud. But what good is the redundancy when the cloud becomes the target of a massive attack. Who/what do you rely on so as to continue your daily operations?
Has the government really been sold on The Emperor's New Cloud [wikipedia.org]
Re:FTA: "separate, secure facility" (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article:
""The USDA requires Microsoft to provide offline access which which we do view as a basic not something vendors can expect somewhere down the line," Rizzo wrote, a dig at Google."
So, the tax-payer is basically paying Microsoft to run a server-farm, access to it both offline and online and software to utilize it. How is this different then the previous arrangement, besides them providing the server farm??
Microsoft will have access to all of the data stored. "But wait!", you might say, "They already have that." The difference here is that now we are GIVING it to them. The data sets that the USDA have on hand are more then just farm reports--they include everything from mortgage arrangements(like my own) to the inner workings of arrangements with companies like Monsanto and ConAgra. Personally, I think such data should be public information but I do not think that any corporation should be privy to such information ALONE.
Do YOU trust Microsoft to stay away from all that shiny information? I don't.