US Navy: I can't quit you, Azure Microsoft has the US Navy over a barrel, as the service admits it can't separate its custom-built cloud environment from Azure infrastructure without a complete rebuild "from the ground up." The Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) published a sole-source justification letter on Tuesday (with award amounts redacted, naturally) …
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100% true story... by default your Microsoft Office application running on Windows is permanently connected to LinkedIn - because, who doesn't want their Office application permanently connected to a social network, right?
They call it "connected experiences".
(To disable it: User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Microsoft Office 2016 > Miscellaneous > Show LinkedIn features in Office applications)
You might not realise, but this hits on a major point. It is *directly* contrary to USN Management and security directives to have critical infrastructure on Azure in the first place. I would be surprised if that wasn't also the case in Australia.Another older example of this kind of violation is US' DHS adopting Exchange and O365 in explicit contravention of a management directive clearly written to prevent it.
This kind of thing is periodically politically overridden, but not usually for an entire branch, for reasons that are rather obvious. Frequent stability, data loss, and security problems far in excess of what sane people would allow,
In the US we have a recent example of another threat, Musk's team were given total access to Azure for a major government system, which directly and immediately resulted in a breech and exfiltrated legal data to Russia. I'm sure that didn't make the USN feel good about that.
It's a wonder most governments haven't been leaning on Microsoft to establish a sovereign cloud partner in their country. Eg, MS provide the technology, but the risk, hardware, premises, etc and billling belongs to the partner. I don't expect MS to be a charity here, they for sure get the MS tax from the partner.
It's not like they didn't do it for China, and I think for Germany.
I'm surprised King Donald hasn't announced a vaporware Trump Gold Cloud service that USG elements are strongly advised to migrate to. Or at least start making monthly payments to now, in anticipation of a future migration.
"Other cloud providers have mere silver linings. Only Trump Gold Cloud has a golden lining."
“ Microsoft has the US Navy over a barrel, as the service admits it can't separate its custom-built cloud environment from Azure infrastructure without a complete rebuild "from the ground up." ”
Custom-built cloud . No surprise there.
I’m sure the Technical Design Authority all have swanky jobs at Microsoft now for their efforts. Lock-in badge achieved.
That would require a few top products which are so good to be top of their niche. Sadly, really sadly, Microsoft is more like a 50% company which does nearly everything half-arsed. Some core elements are 100%, but those are not many compared to the overwhelming mass of half-done crap. There were a few peaks in the past where Microsoft got closer to 70% or 80%, but could not keep that up and let it rot down to 50% again.
Doesn't surprise me. One of my former employers provided a cloud service to, not NAVSEA specifically, but an analogous part of the U.S. Navy. At their insistence and against our repeated counsel that it was a poor idea, they insisted that we make a highly customized version of our service when our off-the-shelf service would have ticked all their boxes. What they got was functional but largely unmaintainable. Then they kept insisting on changes, often for change's sake, withholding payment to force our hand, and pretty soon it was not just unmaintainable but too fragile for purpose as well. That contract ended in tears, and NAV[redacted] probably swears to this day that we were either inept or crooks or both.
FYI, these decisions are always pushed through lobbying, sometimes a team will come directly into the office to make their pitch, and they expect no technical personnel to be present.
Microsoft really likes to hand out TCO numbers written up to sell to MBAs, that are transparently ridiculous to anyone who has any idea what the things they list are.
Then, having already signed something, it's pushed down to Pele who have to implement it verbatim based on the paperwork. I'm certain your scenario was exactly the same, but with dinner of the people swapped around. A senator was likely directly involved.
Rules are rules (and many military procurements have bent the rules in some way or another or even completely ignored them.
Here it would be an architectural decision; design the system to do what it does and use shims to connect to vendor X cloud. Change vendor by rewriting the shim (apologies, management view!)
That's not new, and not the bad part. While a headache to read, it ensures everybody knows exactly what is going on, almost exactly like double entry accounting.
It serves its main purpose well, ... as long as oversight actually exists and is objective. Everyone can do what's needed and follow along, nobody can forget things, and a review can just follow the breadcrumbs to find mistakes. Of course in practice corruption and nepotism can't be prevented by these things alone.
Unless all you use is plain text.
It looks like whoever did the systems used all the "cool" Azure features, but doesn't everyone? whether it's Oracle, Amazon or Alibaba. It's the only way to get the cost down on the cloud, otherwise you have huge platform costs implementing your own data stream/lake/analytics/store/intelligence/bubble-bollocks... Then you are tied in.
Blame the manager who bought into the cloud brochure bollocks in the first place... The it's "cheaper" and you won't be dependent on the grumpy ops team anymore, it will all be continuously improved DevOps with no reliance on people who know what they are doing, everything (including the people) are off the shelf!... In a secure gov cloud.
*sigh* I'm so glad I retired.
I'm just wondering what kind of applications Azure is supporting that can't be duplicated on other platforms. Worse, they claim they would need to fully redesign the application to work somewhere else.
AFAIK Azure doesn't really have unique capabilities. It's mostly repackaged commodity and open-source software with an administrative layer on top.
All cloud providers have unique service offerings that lock in the cloud vendor. AWS, Google, Azure. They also all have Federal environments that are built for DOD compliance. Some agencies have multiple cloud presence, but none of them are interchangeable.
Your story should day that...oh, wait, then it wouldn't attract so much attention.
Agree that the title is pure clickbait, it is a challenge to make your apps and services active-active multi-region due to latency issues regardless of supplier. Adding in another supplier makes the whole task more difficult.
Many commercial offerings stick to one supplier for production systems, with a approach to deploy to another supplier in case they need to exit.
