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Microsoft Makes Inroads With U.S. Spy Agencies

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

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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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday May 21 2018, @06:49PM (1 child)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 21 2018, @06:49PM (#682314) Journal

    Do they spy agencies merely want to buy cloud computing power? Or do they specifically want cloud computing on Microsoft's platform. If Microsoft were to say they would segregate the spy agencies workloads onto separate hardware, would the spy agencies suddenly lose loose interest? If so, then is there some new subtle unknown hardware attack against other workloads merely running on the same hardware?

    Who knows what new spectre or meltdown like attack might exist. Or what kind of secret sauce is baked into Intel hardware beyond what we already know about "Intel Management Engine".

    Maybe Intel has magical undocumented instructions that give access to things low privileged code isn't supposed to have.

    We can totally trust Intel, given their management engine. We can totally trust Microsoft given their history, and NSAKEY. But don't trust Google because they are getting rid of "don't be evil".

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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday May 22 2018, @02:09PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 22 2018, @02:09PM (#682631) Journal

    Hmmmm . . . newer SN article . . .

    https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/05/22/0230240 [soylentnews.org]

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