Now Microsoft is Protesting After Amazon Won a $10 Billion NSA Cloud Contract (theverge.com) 38
An anonymous reader shares a report: After spending years battling over the Defense Department's $10 billion JEDI cloud services contract, Microsoft and Amazon are fighting over another government deal. Now it's the National Security Agency offering a contract that could pay up to $10 billion as it shifts away from on-premises servers to a commercial provider. However, as Washington Technology reported first, this time around, Amazon Web Services won the $10 billion contest, and it's Microsoft's turn to file a protest with the Government Accountability Office.
Washington Technology reports that Microsoft's claim is the NSA didn't conduct a proper evaluation while considering a provider for its new project, code-named WildandStormy. In a statement to NextGov, an NSA spokesperson confirmed the award and protests, saying, "The Agency will respond to the protest in accordance with appropriate federal regulations." The NSA is pursuing a "Hybrid Compute Initiative" to meet its processing and analytical requirements while also holding onto intelligence data (although it might not need as much storage as it used to). AWS already holds many government cloud contracts, but the JEDI process revealed Microsoft as a formidable competitor.
Washington Technology reports that Microsoft's claim is the NSA didn't conduct a proper evaluation while considering a provider for its new project, code-named WildandStormy. In a statement to NextGov, an NSA spokesperson confirmed the award and protests, saying, "The Agency will respond to the protest in accordance with appropriate federal regulations." The NSA is pursuing a "Hybrid Compute Initiative" to meet its processing and analytical requirements while also holding onto intelligence data (although it might not need as much storage as it used to). AWS already holds many government cloud contracts, but the JEDI process revealed Microsoft as a formidable competitor.
And I protest... (Score:1)
all of the dupe stories. *sigh*
Lolz, the NSA will skewer MS (Score:4, Insightful)
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MS is not safe. And the NSA knows it. All of the previous leaks on tools the NSA used for espionage, was like 90% MS hacks. This may be a bad challenge by MS.
This! Company patches 20 freakin year old security holes, and they want to work with the NSA?
All these exploits recently - anyone want to guess how we know Microsoft handed out the keys to the Kingdom to whoever is hacking into our systems? A few weeks later there's an out of band patch.
Betrayal (Score:4, Insightful)
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MS feels betrayed. MS has been inserting backdoors into software and sharing the zero day exploits with NSA to use all over the world for freaking 40 years. And they go ahead and give the cloud contract to Amazon? What has Amazon ever done to make the NSA's job easier? No wonder MS sued.
But now all the wrong people know the MS backdoors. They're a secret all over the world.
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Thats why you have patches. Once the NSA is done using the backdoor you issue a patch. or if the Russians or Iranians find out about the backdoor you issue a patch and install a new backdoor for the NSA as part of the patch.
But the patches are released after the Compromise happens. Intel agencies tend to not like handing out the keys to the kingdom.
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Ugh...what a nightmare that was.
If you're mostly a windows operator and you can just buy your servers and rent your MSSQL database as a service from Azure, you might be ok.
But if you are a RHEL house, with Oracle and need things like 24/7 uptime, and come with your own software and admins, you'd be better served giving a HARD eye to Amazon.
At least from my hard learned l
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This is true. While most virtual machines run Linux on Azure, it should be noted that the hosts run Windows Server with Hyper-V, and most of their so-called "serverless" applications like PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc., run on Windows Server.
NSA knows better and is well aware of Windows security issues. MSFT is between a rock and a hard place justifying its position as a better choice than the AWS Linux hosts.
*poof* (Score:2)
Watch as the defense budget goes not to national defense, but legal defense of procurement against big cloud providers.
Re:*poof* (Score:4, Interesting)
How about a law that enshrines legal standing of these contracts proportional to the amount of taxes the provider actually pays.
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This doesn't make any sense for businesses. The amount of tax they pay only serves to hinder the amount of economic activity they engage...
Um. The amount of tax they pay reduces a company's net profits, and hence their potential retained earnings, but it's a stretch to say definitively that that reduces the amount of economic activity they engage in. More activity leads to higher revenues, and hence higher profits, regardless of the tax rate (assuming you're not taxing them out of existence).
But actually applying taxes which reduce the operational income of the company produces a net REDUCTION in overall tax revenue over time because it slows or negates growth of all the aforementioned tax revenue streams.
Not true. First off, you're making the assumption that there are sufficient opportunities for productive investment, and hence growth. One only has to loo
Business as usual ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Contesting a contract award seems pretty standard now, especially with the larger ones. It's a good way to get it canceled and re- written/invented as new contract that may be more favorable to what you can provide or less favorable to what your competitors can provide..
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We get stuck with the inefficiencies the process generates.
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The government contract system has a lot of issues in general. It is often not a fair and open bidding process. The agency putting out the contract knows ahead of time who they are going to pick, they build the contract around the company they want to choose.
However most agencies know they don't want to look like they are doing it, even though all of them do, they will often throw a bone to some smaller firm, or rotate vendors around. Very Rarely do they ever put a contract out for work who they have no
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TLDR, we funded campaigns, we want our due (Score:4, Funny)
OMG!!! Microsoft ain't having the fact that they spent a ton of money getting politicians elected only to have a far more wealthy company steal a contract from them. I mean, why oh why did they spend so much money buying off those politicians. Er... I mean using their free speech by promoting specific political campaigns.
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That doesn't seem like it can be the case here though. The house of gates has already allied itself with the trumpscum... hence them getting handed that JEDI contract on a platter a few years back. So what politicians did they spend to elect this time around? Certainly not the president or VP; since their names are not trump and pence. So what can MS reasonably expect from the enemy of their ally?
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If they didn't then they may not have been in second place, with a chance to introduce the next project.
Amazon too put "their free speech" into helping them. Also both companies probably had "Free Speech" both political parties.
NSA In The Cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)
Shouldn't the NSA be doing their own datacenters? Screw Microsoft's cloud. Screw all the cloudy services.
Even GCC High isn't adequately secure to be trusted at that level. To my knowledge GCC High still doesn't satisfy ITAR because or it's reliance on Azure for identity.
Re: NSA In The Cloud? (Score:3)
What happened to that big-ass data center in Utah? Did It run out of batteries?
https://www.wired.com/2012/03/... [wired.com]
Remember: it's super secret, so...shhhh!
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It's still there. [nextgov.com]
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Well, at least as of 2014, it is, according to the publication date of that article.
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I came here to ask about this. Since the contract specifically states "hybrid cloud," I assume that data center in the hot Utah desert will remain.
A data center in the hot Utah desert? Make your own government jokes about that.
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This is the US government you are talking about, staffed by job for life bureaucrats. For $10B you will get a vast number of staff managing each other via a vast number of forms and maybe one 486 running MS-DOS.
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Not all data they have likely requires super-duper-ultra-secure data systems.
You know, like when they are collecting all of our phone calls, call meta data, location data, etc. The data storage requirements necessary to collect all of that stuff on us is huge, but since we all just give it away to anyone who asks for it if we get another free level on Candy Crush, well the NSA doesn't have to protect it all that well either.
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The NSA is the organization that put all its top secret documentation on a Windows Server and gave external contractors full access to it. Snowdon leaked full details of many of their illegal campaigns.
AWS or Google cloud could do a better jobs. Azure.. Probably not.
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"Shouldn't the NSA be doing their own datacenters? "
You mean like they are actually doing here? "Cloud" is being used here in the correct sense of computational resources that are not specific to the location of the use rof the resource, not the herp-derp meme of "someone else's computers".
These contracts are to build build bespoke centralized data centers to consolidate location specific computation such that there is a common pool to draw from at peak usage. The companies that pursue these contracts are t
NSA just needs to learn how AWS works... (Score:2)
This is pure business... (Score:3)
Of course the loser needs to protest...
You're not just talking about an initial $10b dollar charge. Once the govt has a foothold, they will continue marching on that path and it will be difficult to make them take a new path.
That $10b then becomes lock-in, not just for that single project, but it will likely be lock-in for all future projects as well.
If I were Google or IBM or Oracle, I'd be in there protesting too. Because the first one everyone adopts will likely be the only one going forward.
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It doesn't have to be lock-in though, but they would have to mandate free and open source software on off-the-shelf hardware only.
Cloud is the stupidest idea ever.. (Score:2)
.. that sounded good on paper.
Now it's taking me on the order of weeks to get Microsoft to resolve an issue I could fix myself with access to the infrastructure in a few minutes.
I guess it's a way of dealing with the aging IT professional community retiring out of the ecosystem.
Soon enough techs will be like the Mechanicum praying to the Omnissiah.
Not Bezos fan, but AWS is better (Score:2)
I'm not a big fan of Jeff Bezos or Amazon in general, but anyone who has spent time using both AWS and Azure knows AWS is more reliable, stable and seemingly better designed. Sure Azure does a few things better here and there, but in general AWS wins IMHO.
That said, I'm not sure I would trust some things with either company. Would have to be complete transparency to underlying technology and methods. I have my doubts this would be the case regardless of which providers won.