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posted by janrinok on Monday May 21 2018, @03:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the spy-vs-spy dept.

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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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by https on Monday May 21 2018, @05:15PM (2 children)

    by https (5248) on Monday May 21 2018, @05:15PM (#682274) Journal

    MS bought skype and handed over access. I'd call that a pass.

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  • (Score: 2) by corey on Tuesday May 22 2018, @12:15AM (1 child)

    by corey (2202) on Tuesday May 22 2018, @12:15AM (#682467)

    I was going to comment that this looks like a case of scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. Microsoft incorporated spyware into the most popular OS in the world and is likely feeding that info onto the 3-letter agencies. Here's their payday.

    Use Linux, don't use cloud services without encrypting your data first. If you can: gmail will reject attaching encrypted attachments. So I pay for an online privacy oriented email provider.

    • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday May 22 2018, @03:12AM

      by Nerdfest (80) on Tuesday May 22 2018, @03:12AM (#682517)

      Gmail does not reject encrypting attachments. I use GMail and use full encryption as well (PGP/EnigMail, etc). But yeah, encrypt first. If you don't control the keys, assume the NSA does.