Top
Best
New

Posted by hn_acker 7 hours ago

Federal Cyber Experts Called Microsoft's Cloud "A Pile of Shit", yet Approved It(www.propublica.org)
375 points | 153 commentspage 2
markstos 6 hours ago|
Frustrating that FedRAMP is both a pain to get compliant with and also apparently is not a strong signal of actual security.
colechristensen 6 hours ago|
I see you've never worked in a compliance environment before.
Havoc 6 hours ago||
And may such evil days never come to past
caseysoftware 6 hours ago||
Was this approval before or after evaluators discovered this?

> Microsoft on Friday revised its practices to ensure that engineers in China no longer provide technical support to U.S. defense clients using the company’s cloud services.

Ref: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/18/microsoft-china-digital-esco...

klooney 5 hours ago||
> Potential Conflict of Interest: The government relies, in part, on third-party firms to vet cloud technology, but those firms are hired and paid by the company being assessed.

Hah. First time looking at FedRAMP?

The real reason for this, of course, is accounting, it moves it off of the government's books.

jakubadamw 6 hours ago||
Little has changed since Bill Gates tried to install Movie Maker.
stainablesteel 2 hours ago||
when someone says they work at meta, they get weird looks, but no one assumes they're incompetent

when someone says they work at microsoft, they get weird looks, and people assume they're incompetent

gurjeet 4 hours ago||
> These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

It's unfortunate that people have to claim the authenticity, rather than the users of AI having to disclose use of AI/LLM. I wish it was the other way around.

robtherobber 7 hours ago||
Wow, Microsoft is really pushing the wrong boundaries in every direction, isn't it? Executives must be thinking, like many before them, that Microsoft is too big to fail.
joe_mamba 7 hours ago|
Executives only react to share price movements. If share prices are high because whatever investors think, then execs will just open another champagne bottle.

Steve Jobs was the last tech CEO who didn't care about wall street and only care about quality products and consumers saying that if customers are happy, then the share price will take care of itself. But most companies are share price first, customer later.

shrubble 6 hours ago||
This fits perfectly with traditional Microsoft strategies of getting a foot in the door and then having the users’ internal pressure on the organization to help get the Microsoft product established.

Decades ago, Lotus 1-2-3 on top of MSDOS was the lever; today it’s GCC High.

brudgers 6 hours ago||
Given the scale and scope of the Federal Government. what are the alternatives to Microsoft?

Building in house.

Outsourcing to consultants.

realo 5 hours ago||
IBM? Redhat?
nonameiguess 5 hours ago||
I think there's some context missing here. For those who don't remember, the CIA back in like 2014 or so built out private data centers with classified versions of AWS services and all IC workloads that don't require specialized hardware was supposed to be using. DOD historically used it as well for classified cloud workloads, but wanted its own, and this was the JEDI contract, which was also supposed to go to Amazon, until Trump got into a fight with Jeff Bezos in 2019, canceled the contract, and awarded it to Microsoft instead. Amazon sued, and Biden decided to just award the contract to everyone and split it between all the major cloud vendors. That still doesn't mean anyone can actually use it without FedRAMP approval, but well, there you go.

The alternative was AWS, which has been operating at every classification level for over a decade at this point. It's now split between Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, and Google, which is especially amusing because Google withdrew from the original bid process when they were still pretending to give a shit that their employees don't like working for the military.

yoyohello13 7 hours ago|
Basically exactly what my org did. The momentum of being a Microsoft shop is hard to fight against.
More comments...