4 ms·

Why is Microsoft better for taxpayers?

• busterarm 6y ago
  Because the investment prevents Amazon having a total monopoly on Cloud and helps keep the price from skyrocketing in the future. I say that as someone who is all in on AWS.
  • toomuchtodo 6y ago
    This is an important point. It’s a readiness premium. Otherwise, you’re beholden to an org “too big to fail” like we’ve done to ourselves with Boeing.
  • DetroitThrow 6y ago
    I don't think winning a federal contract is what would allow or disallow Amazon from having a monopoly on cloud, and I don't think the current state of the market is monopoly (though oligopoly or duopoly might be appropriate).
    • Bedon292 6y ago
      Amazon already has GovCloud and C2S. If they also got JEDI, they would have complete lock in / monopoly for all of the federal government's cloud services. And with the length of all these contracts, they get guaranteed lock in for a long time. There needs to be competitors in the space to prevent complete lock in. Otherwise the price of re-doing all the systems for a different cloud would be immense. They could basically set whatever price they want on their services, as long as it cheaper than the cost of moving they will keep the contracts for decades to come.
      • srtjstjsj 6y ago
        MS and Google already have various government cloud deployments. Amazon just squatted on the "GovCloud" name. And Congress can always pass a law to limit prices, and the Executive can easily win an antitrust case if the vendor gouges them.
      • dragonwriter 6y ago
        > Amazon already has GovCloud and C2S. If they also got JEDI, they would have complete lock in / monopoly for all of the federal government's cloud services. GovCloud isn't a contract, it's a region certified to meet FedRAMP-HIGH and other federal data requirements (and is available to non-federal-government customers that need that, as well as federal government.) Microsoft has an equivalent (Azure Government), and it's public regions are FedRAMP-HIGH certified. GCP also has FedRAMP-HIGH certification in many of their public regions but doesn't seem to have anything directly comparable to AWS GovCloud or Azure Government currently. So, no, JEDI wouldn't give AWS a monopoly either on federal government cloud or cloud for people dealing with federal mandates like FedRAMP.
        • Bedon292 6y ago
          I did not mean to imply that GovCloud was a contract. I though it was the exclusive provider of isolated cloud services. I didn't realize Azure had its Government region. Glad that exists, I want to see that competition. However FedRAMP is not relevant to what I was trying to say. My understanding is government itself directly uses just the AWS and now Azure isolated regions. What I was meaning to say was for the DoD, which I though was exclusively under AWS GovCloud, and AWS C2S, rather than the whole government. They could certainly be using Azure Government though. I am glad to know there is more competition than I though. Thanks.
          • dragonwriter 6y ago
            > My understanding is government itself directly uses just the AWS and now Azure isolated regions. This is not true, at least based on the discussions I've been involved in with AWS reps (while my employer is a state government entity, how the feds use AWS has frequently come up.) There are US Government customers without the requirements that are only provided on the isolated regions that use the commercial offerings that have the appropriate guarantees for their data, and there are non-federal customers that use the isolated government regions for data which has the higher-level federal requirements that require those guarantees. FedRAMP isn't the only force here, but it's a key requirement that drives the choice. (Also, GovCloud was cleared for some requirements before commercial offerings, so some customers, including some federal ones, are currently on GovCloud with workloads that could be served on the commercial regions now.)
• pbronez 6y ago
  Microsoft has a pretty strong pitch for government cloud services. The department of defense runs one of the largest Active Directory deployments in the world, along with a huge install base of Windows desktops, Office, SQL Server and SharePoint. Many of these DoD deployments have been extensively customized by Microsoft’s professional services division, which has an excellent reputation in the defense industry. Apparently Microsoft rolled lessons learned from these big deployments into their Azure offerings. I think it’s clear that DoD can reduce costs and improve service quality by migrating to Azure managed service variants of existing Microsoft systems. Amazon is probably better for basic IaaS, but this SaaS/PaaS stuff is gonna be better on Azure, at least when you already have such a big commitment to the ecosystem. There are probably some strategic concerns too. Amazon has been the only real cloud provider to the defense world for years. Giving Microsoft a big contract means the government will have more options in the future. This dynamic really only shows up in huge enterprises with weird needs... look at NASA for another example. If you want to complain about Microsoft’s behavior, the best place to look is probably at the non-hosted upgrade paths for their legacy products. They could refuse to let you run Word without Office 365; Office 365 requires Azure, so you have to certify Azure for your data to keep writing documents. That’s a pretty aggressive move to pull on any client though.. the sort of thing that pushes folks to make do with Libre Office.
  • srtjstjsj 6y ago
    "MS runs a lot of propriety IT systems" isn't a reason I'd want government using their stuff. Government should run on open standards.