Microsoft Wins A Big Cloud Deal With America's Intelligence Community

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."

Realy? Front page news?

[cpurdy]

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."

Re:

[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.

BSOD

[rojash]

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

Re:

[thegarbz]

Don't be silly. Linux doesn't BSOD.

The cloud gives a tactical edge?

[llamalad]

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.

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:

[AHuxley]

Connect the MS federal cloud to city efforts like Domain Awareness System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Spy on people like its was PRISM in every city, state, federal, globally.

The Smoking Cloud

[stooo]

>> the cloud to give it a tactical edge on the battlefield

Yeah, but smoke clouds to hide your position is a WWII technology...

Picard: How the fuck

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

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.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

and nicely wrapped in astronomical contract fees. When I worked for the US DoD I was shocked with what my work site paid Oracle for shit service. Come to think of it, our Microsoft support contract was mind bogglingly expensive and not very useful.

Re:

[thegarbz]

Their offerings are just legacy hosted servers wrapped with a fuckton of poorly trained people.

So they are what you would call a Silicon Valley Cloud Startup then?

MS Hosting Defense Data

[BlueStrat]

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

WCPGW?

Strat

Re:

[AHuxley]

Its PRISM 2.0

Re:

[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 th

Re:

[olsmeister]

Presumably that includes the US military.

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:

[AHuxley]

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... [washingtonpost.com]
"Who has security clearance? More than 4.3M people" (June 6, 2017 )
https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
Nearly 5 Million People Have Government Security Clearances (07.23.12)
https://www.wired.com/2012/07/... [wired.com]

Cloud A.I. ?

[DontBeAMoran]

We also have cloud Eh Aye in Canada, eh?

Re:

[stooo]

Good one :)
The problem is bing maps has poor coverage over North Korea for example.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Another triumph for Linux

[OneHundredAndTen]

After all, the Microsoft's cloud infrastructure runs on Linux.

Of course, they threw in all their customer's data

[gweihir]

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.

Payoffs

[found404]

Lots of these "deals" are payoffs for the continued (backroom) cooperation Microsoft and others provide.

Classic Microsoft

[volt4ire]

Looks like they're following their time-honored strategy of embrace, extend, and eavesdrop

Re:

[stooo]

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.

Enticement

[ayesnymous]

Use our cloud service - we give access to all our users' telemetry data for free!

Microsoft would sell it's soul for a dollar

[SysEngineer]

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.