US congress-critters question prime directive of Pentagon's $10bn JEDI cloud contract A pair of US congressmen are calling for an investigation into the Pentagon's $10bn single-vendor IT contract dubbed JEDI – aka the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. House Reps Tom Cole (R-OK) and Steve Womack (R-AR) have sent a letter asking the inspector general of the Department of Defense (DOD) to probe and report …
Blake 5 was a dream given form. Hiss goal: to prevent another war by creating a place where humans and aliens could work out their differences peacefully. It's a port of call, home away from home for diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs, and wanderers. Humans and aliens wrapped in two million, five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night
The big question is now: How much money did IBM and Oracle (and probably a few other potential vendors not named Amazon) give to these two? As we all know, America's government is bought and paid for by the highest bidder nowadays (thanks Citizen's United!). Maybe one day we can take it back at the polls, maybe institute some term limits and major limits on lobbying for elected officials. Pipe dream, I know....
This has nothing to do with the technology or capability of the presumptive winner (AWS). It has everything to do with political manipulation to keep out the new kid on the block. (Not that Amazon is completely new, but the defense contractors trying to torpedo the contract have been entrenched for a good part of a century.)
I would hope that if they get the contract that they and DoD sort out the passwords on the servers, etc. Seems there's been too much in the news about wide open buckets, etc. from AWS lately. Given the antagonism of Trump/Bezos I wonder how AWS is the so-called leading contender?
And this does have a smell of a targeted contract to a pre-selected contractor though.
Then obviously to maintain narrative consistency, you have to single-source it and include a catastrophic single point of failure. Something like an un-shielded server heat exhaust port out of the data center. That way a teen-ager can take out the whole server farm by throwing a pipe bomb in the vent!
(Seriously guys, am I the only one who actually watched these movies?!?)
/sarcasm off
But when I was doing bid work the advice was that if you weren't involved in writing the requirements it was usually a waste of time bidding.
I assume many sales people from many suppliers were shoulder bumping to get their USP included.
Kudos to whoever swung the "of course, you will need the highest level of accreditation" knowing that they were the only ones who could meet it.
Hard to counter with "it doesn't really need to be that secure" - not a positive message.
The worry, say the pair, is that the requirements for the JEDI contract are so specific that Uncle Sam would end up overpaying for a system it could have obtained for a better price and at a higher quality had it broken the contract into smaller parts that made more providers eligible
"better price"? "higher quality?" Yeah, but what does that have to do with IBM and Oracle?
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