Microsoft Announces ‘Secret’ Cloud Capability, Closes In on Amazon
Microsoft Announces ‘Secret’ Cloud Capability, Closes
In on Amazon
The advancement moves
Microsoft closer to competing for the Pentagon’s coveted JEDI top-secret-cloud
contract.
Microsoft officials
announced Tuesday that the company had achieved the
required security levels to host secret U.S. military
and intelligence data on its cloud computer network, Azure, and claimed they
were on track to host “top secret” information soon. The developments put the
computer giant in closer competition with cloud rival Amazon to handle the
government’s most delicate and important information and perhaps to vie for the
Pentagon’s coveted nearly $10 billion cloud contract known as JEDI.
Microsoft
offers a variety of services for Azure customers allowing them to use their
cloud data from machine learning to artificial intelligence and
analytics, in addition to media tools and integration with Internet of
Things devices.
Within
months, government agencies and workers could run their secret data through
those applications.
“We’re
taking our public cloud Azure and sending our FedRamp moderate coverage to
cover 50 of those services,” said Julia White, corporate vice president of
Microsoft Azure, referring to cybersecurity framework for cloud hosting for
government. “By the end of the calendar year, those 50 services will have FedRamp high certification.”
Competing
for government-sized cloud contracts is s a big step forward for Microsoft,
which remains publicly recognized by its Windows operating system and popular
applications like Word that run on laptops and PCs. The emergence of cloud
services, especially free ones like Google Docs, presented a big challenge to
everything that Microsoft was about.
White
says Microsoft is well positioned to take advantage of where computing is
today, with enterprises and agencies wanting to store more information on the cloud
but with lots of data of various formats still stuck inside
on-premises machines.
The
Internet of Things, or IOT, is composed more and
more of devices that send data to the cloud but also keep and use it. It is a
world of machines that possess lots of innate capability and more memory, even
rudimentary artificial intelligence, because of advances in the miniaturization
of computer components.
“IOT is maturing, evolving. [Devices] are getting far
more sophisticated, they’re able to run real applications on these little
devices,” said White.
The
developments are giving rise to highly-complex “hybrid” environments with lots
of data sitting on old computers and in data centers, lots of additional data
going to the public cloud, and lots of smart devices holding and broadcasting
data. The challenge is to provide the same level of service, the same cool apps
and programs, to customers that are keeping more of their data in so many
different places, says White. “We’ve built toward this hybrid approach,” she says,
with services that can run on premises machines as well as in the cloud. They
even sell enormous databoxes, like digital treasure chests,
that can transport data from one place to another.
Amazon
is still a much bigger cloud provider than Microsoft at about four times the revenue, though that
percentage is shrinking. They’ve also got an enormous developer community constantly
making new programs and services to experiment and play with data.
Some
concerns have been growing about Amazon in the national security community.
Last November, someone in the military accidently left nearly 100 GB of classified data on the
public facing AWS portal. It was user error,
not a hack or unknown security flaw of Amazon’s. But it still represents a
problem for Amazon, which places control and management responsibility in the hands of the
customer —as in, operators or developers whose specialty is not managing a
complex cloud environment.
Both
Microsoft and Google have put additional processes in place to protect their
cloud from user error. “While you have control over the environment that you’ve
created in Azure, a virtual machine can only be turned
on if it has this set of security capabilities around it… even things like ‘who
can access this type of application’ can be preconfigured with
these policies.”
But
Google on Monday announced that they would drop out of the competition, citing
an inability to meet the security levels required and because they could not be
“assured that it would align with our AI Principles,” according to a
Google spokesperson.
Google’s
abdication leaves Amazon and Microsoft as the two most likely contenders for
the JEDI contract.
Comments
Post a Comment