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Amazon, Microsoft wage war over the Pentagon's 'war cloud':
Amazon and Microsoft are battling it out over a $10 billion opportunity to build the U.S. military its first "war cloud" computing system. But Amazon's early hopes of a shock-and-awe victory may be slipping away.
Formally called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure plan, or JEDI, the military's computing project would store and process vast amounts of classified data, allowing the Pentagon to use artificial intelligence to speed up its war planning and fighting capabilities. The Defense Department hopes to award the winner-take-all contract as soon as August. Oracle and IBM were eliminated at an earlier round of the contract competition.
But that's only if the project isn't derailed first. It faces a legal challenge by Oracle and growing congressional concerns about alleged Pentagon favoritism toward Amazon. Military officials hope to get started soon on what will be a decade-long business partnership they describe as vital to national security.
"This is not your grandfather's internet," said Daniel Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a defense-oriented think tank. "You're talking about a cloud where you can go from the Pentagon literally to the soldier on the battlefield carrying classified information."
Amazon was considered an early favorite when the Pentagon began detailing its cloud needs in 2017, but its candidacy has been marred by an Oracle allegation that Amazon executives and the Pentagon have been overly cozy. Oracle has a final chance to make its case against Amazon - and the integrity of the government's bidding process - in a court hearing Wednesday.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Thursday July 11 2019, @06:20AM
"You're talking about a cloud where you can go from the Pentagon literally to the soldier on the battlefield carrying classified information."
He's also gotten the situation completely turned around. The information classically filters upwards. Reliable information must be able to get up to the appropriate level to where it can be used to make informed decisions about tactics and, at higher levels, strategy. However, the qualifying word is reliable. As the information is aggregated and summarized at each level that it passes up through it necessarily loses detail and, unecessarily but inevitably, becomes politicized. The politicization comes, in the best cases, from cherry-picking what to pay attention to and, in the worst case, from plain old lying.
However, other nations would find the flow from the top down useful since that is what they can react to. Because Amazon is unproven still and with M$ very long and proven track record of utter failure in both design and security, it will be enemies (external ones beyond just the inernal ones Amazon and M$) who will get the most practical use out of this "cloud" scam. It's nothing but a very expensive scam which will cost lives as well as money by making a bigger more confusing mess while not just leaking secrets but plain radiating them.
Infrastructure cannot be safely or inexpensively outsourced. Businesses learned that the hard way and their schooling is there for everyone to see, including the government's employees. This whole thing looks like it is taking pork barrel politics to a new realm, one where money flows to business based on factions rather than groups of businesses based upon geographical populations.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.