Amazon and Google Barred From UK Government Cloud 79
judgecorp writes "Amazon and Google both applied for a role in the U.K. government's 'G-Cloud' for public services, but were rejected, a FOI request has revealed. It is most likely this was because of concerns about where data was hosted and backed up. Amazon Web Services has a dedicated cloud service for the government in the U.S., but has not been able to duplicate that in Britain."
Why cloud? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why don't they run their own datacenter and have centralised IT services, rather than relying on some third party private company? Is it because they want to have someone to blame if things do go wrong?
US Law Everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
If a company has any operations in the US, they are expected to follow US law worldwide. Even if the parent is in Germany and the offense occurred by a subsidiary in the Philippines, the US government has no qualms about going after their US arm. If this wasn't bad enough, it isn't always the Federal government. If the NY State attorney general thinks a foreign company has some dealings with Iran, he will not hesitate to pursue legal action.
If I was the UK government, how would I feel about the possibility of some low level government guy in Seattle saying, I can get to everything in the UK cloud without a warrant?
Obama administration is "arguing that you lose your property rights by storing something on a cloud computing service"
Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/governments-attack-cloud-computing [eff.org]
If you use the cloud, only do it for data you are willing to openly publish.
Hey China, keep your mil stuff in the USA! (Score:4, Insightful)
I am sure national governments will be really happy about storing their private/ secret data in another country's territory "because it's encrypted so it will be safe".
Would the US government network be happy about a Chinese commercial provider supplying their network provision on Chinese territory? without auditing the network? From the article: "Amazon had concerns over the stipulation that the UK government could audit US data centres" - Amazon were asking the UK government to store their data on another country's territory, and not even be given permission to check how the centres were secured? Not surprised the UK government weren't too keen on this deal.