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MichaelDavidCrawford writes:

Microsoft has secured a potentially lucrative agreement that makes the full suite of the tech giant's cloud-computing platform available to 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, executives said recently, moving agencies' computer systems onto Office 365 applications and adding certain cloud-based applications not previously available to them.

The agreement could strengthen Microsoft's prospects for winning government business at a time when it is locked in competition with some of the world's biggest tech companies for a Pentagon cloud-computing contract that is expected to be worth billions.

For years, Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon.com that provides cloud computing for businesses and government agencies, has been the primary provider of cloud services to U.S. intelligence agencies, thanks to a $600 million contract with the CIA. (Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)

That remains the case after the recent agreement. Still, executives from Microsoft framed the contract agreement as an "awakening."

"This is a huge win from a Microsoft perspective," said Dana Barnes, vice president of the company's joint and defense agencies business unit. "It's kind of an awakening as far as the intelligence community is concerned that you can't be a one-cloud community."

http://www.oregonlive.com/today/index.ssf/2018/05/microsoft_makes_inroads_with_u.html

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