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What's the point of "awarding a cloud contract" to a single entity when from the perspective of commodification when the government can instead use all cloud pr

What's the point of "awarding a cloud contract" to a single entity when from the perspective of commodification when the government can instead use all cloud providers (maybe in different proportions though) at the same time? The point of the cloud is treating it like a commodity. Unfortunately this smells very much like favoritism.

remus 5y ago
> The point of the cloud is treating it like a commodity. Is it? The article is pretty unclear on what exactly GCHQ is trying to achieve (not unusual for intelligence agencies of course!) I think it's hard to comment on whether awarding the contract to AWS was reasonable when we don't know what any of the requirements are.
tomschlick 5y ago
> What's the point of "awarding a cloud contract" to a single entity when from the perspective of commodification when the government can instead use all cloud providers (maybe in different proportions though) at the same time? Because it's really hard to train technical staff, certify the security of, and harden your attack vectors on one platform let alone doing it for 10 of them. These providers that handle gov data generally have isolated data-centers with more stringent security protocols, like making every employee have a security clearance. Doing that for more providers would increase costs exponentially for very little gain.
nova22033 5y ago
government agencies do that all the time? Do you store some of your data in oracle and some of it in mysql?
unethical_ban 5y ago
I think cloud providers let the "you can use anybody, it's so freeing!" myth go on, so people would feel safe moving into the cloud. In practice, each cloud is its own technology stack. You have to be a very large player to be useful "at scale" in multiple clouds, and you have to have separate teams. It's like having your Windows server department, Linux department, mainframe department, SQL server admins, DB2 admins, Postgres admins, NFS team and SAN team.

remus 5y ago

> The point of the cloud is treating it like a commodity. Is it? The article is pretty unclear on what exactly GCHQ is trying to achieve (not unusual for intelligence agencies of course!) I think it's hard to comment on whether awarding the contract to AWS was reasonable when we don't know what any of the requirements are.

tomschlick 5y ago

> What's the point of "awarding a cloud contract" to a single entity when from the perspective of commodification when the government can instead use all cloud providers (maybe in different proportions though) at the same time? Because it's really hard to train technical staff, certify the security of, and harden your attack vectors on one platform let alone doing it for 10 of them. These providers that handle gov data generally have isolated data-centers with more stringent security protocols, like making every employee have a security clearance. Doing that for more providers would increase costs exponentially for very little gain.

nova22033 5y ago

government agencies do that all the time? Do you store some of your data in oracle and some of it in mysql?

unethical_ban 5y ago

I think cloud providers let the "you can use anybody, it's so freeing!" myth go on, so people would feel safe moving into the cloud. In practice, each cloud is its own technology stack. You have to be a very large player to be useful "at scale" in multiple clouds, and you have to have separate teams. It's like having your Windows server department, Linux department, mainframe department, SQL server admins, DB2 admins, Postgres admins, NFS team and SAN team.