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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
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday May 21 2018, @11:06PM
As a multinational, Microsoft cut out any 3rd party nation and are fine being hostile to the US all on their own. Yay globalized free market.
Oh that's OK they're not on the secure machines. They're on the cloud... It's a safe place... In the sky... Made from satellites... And tubes...
Then again, all government work ends up as Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents stored on a local active directory CIFS server and passed on between offices using the internal Exchange servers and serviced by personal certified by Microsoft. So, just letting Microsoft take over is probably just as fucked up and expensive, but more secure since there's less room for human error when Microsoft employees can operate and monitor fewer servers directly. Well, assuming you don't mind putting all your eggs in one basket... But we're long past that.
*Those secret air-gaped machines end-up compiling spreadsheets and reports that are copied over usb drives and passed on to the brass to read on their government issued laptops that they take home to let their kids play over on the weekends.
compiling...