One cloud to rule them all at DOD?

I heard about this on the news this evening and I am questioning a few things. Why the cloud? Why advertise this? Amazon appears to be the prime single contract holder in the running for the securing of this data and apparently will take control shortly. The discussion on the info I watched was leery about a single organization being the sole contract holder. I can see problems with this regardless of which organization is holding the guarding contract. It's just a matter of time before the cloud is hacked imho. But I'd like to hear what others think on this topic. I included a couple links and info.

Ellen Lord, the Pentagon acquisitions chief, said the Department of Defense is closing in on a solicitation to dramatically advance its scale in cloud computing.

"We are, no kidding, right now writing the contract to get everything moved to one cloud to begin with and then go from there," Lord said in a Dec. 3 panel discussion at the Reagan Defense Forum in Simi Valley, Calif.

Lord said the big problem is that "we are not leveraging everything even within one service or across the services," meaning that drones and tanks and ships and ground troops can't always share data in real time, and can't contribute data to central repositories to allow for machine intelligence to assist in warfighting.

"A fundamental shift we're making is to move the entire DOD to the cloud so our data can be shared and leveraged and we can do big data analytics," she said. "We can do artificial intelligence. This again is a question of scale."
fcw.com...

Then this just a few days ago:

The Pentagon has opened a winner-take-all competition for a multibillion-dollar cloud services contract, dismaying Microsoft Corp., International Business Machines Corp. and industry groups representing rivals such as Oracle Corp., which worry the move will favor Amazon.com Inc.

While companies jockeying for a piece of the business pushed for the use of multiple cloud providers, the Pentagon announced its decision on March 7 to go with a single company. The department already has difficulty moving information, particularly to the battlefield, and using multiple clouds would “exponentially increase the complexity,” Tim Van Name, deputy director of the ‎Defense Digital Service, said on a call with reporters.

The scope of the Defense Department’s current technology needs—3.4 million users and 4 million devices—hints at the massive size of the award. Chief management officer Jay Gibson confirmed that “we anticipate this will be a multibillion-dollar contract,” although the Pentagon hasn’t given an estimate of the project’s cost.

“Whichever one of you wins this, I’m challenging you to bring your ‘A Game,’” Air Force Brigadier General David Krumm, deputy director for requirements for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told industry representatives during an earlier briefing near the Pentagon in Washington’s Virginia suburbs. “This is going to make a difference like few things have to get data to our war-fighters when and where he or she needs it.”
www.digitalcommerce360.com...

Could this be one reason Trump is taking on Amazon all of a sudden?

a reply to: StoutBroux


This idea is as good as a condom made from sandpaper.

a reply to: DBCowboy

As much as this statement is going to sound contradictive, it doesn't seem like a good idea at all but from my limited research, it's apparently been in the works for quite some time and I'm wondering why it's just now being exposed. Or better yet, why it's just now being publically questioned.

a reply to: StoutBroux


Probably because it's already a "done-deal".

This is the stuff Musk was warning us about.

"Yeah, trust us, we just want to link our tanks n stuff together"

KIOOHD (keep it on our hard drive) didn't sound as cool as cloud.

Who hooks the fn military to the internet?

Nobody, we are the targets.


added:
Hoping it's us, because someone must have missed the Terminator movies.

a reply to: DBCowboy

Probably, because the EU already as a deal with Amazon

aws.amazon.com...

The EU Data Protection Directive (also known as Directive 95/46/EC) is a regulation that covers the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data. Broadly, this Directive sets out a number of data protection requirements which apply when personal data is being processed.

The General Data Protection Regulation, adopted in April 2016, will supersede the Data Protection Directive and will be enforceable starting on 25 May 2018.

Interesting stuff on the link above.

The "cloud" is just a pig that corporations put lipstick on to sell server shares to the public in those same old boring server farms.
Research NAS (Network Attached Storage)
"Know what I mean , Vern ? " - Jim Varney

originally posted by: DBCowboy
a reply to: StoutBroux


Probably because it's already a "done-deal".

100% correct. The contract has already been awarded. This is all for public show.

Skynet can fix that problem for you, just give it full control

In the commercial world it would be known as a CSS (Customer Service System). I worked for a company that had allowed all their department to run their own customer databases and servers. Everything from estate management, business and personal customer accounts, service contracts, legal, sales, marketing, engineering and so on. It was absolute chaos if someone needed to create a new account or be transferred between departments because the addresses would either not be up to date or not in the database at all. One task would require being transferred between six or more departments. Other time there were misspellings or duplicate accounts. So they got a single database, simply by getting various departments to gradually merge their databases one at a time. When an address was changed with one department, it was changed for them all.

I'd imagine the DoD would do something similar. Everything from maps to satellite photos, fuel and munition inventory, troop and base locations. If they want to plan a mission they would have to pull everything together which would take days. Get everything online and indexed, it would take a few hours.

One cloud to rule them all

The Cloud is ever watchful, it cannot be unmade... One does not simply walk into the chasm from whence it came and cast it back...There is evil there that does not sleep. - It is folly!

I remember about 18 to 20 years ago when we would talk about thing like this, including SMART meters and homes and appliances being connected to the internet, and we were call "tin foil cap wearers".

It looks like we may not have been as crazy as they all said we were.

What a god awful decision from a security perspective, considering the amount of sensitive to secret information that has to be on the servers, then add in the security problems for any cloud environment this is just begging someone to come get whats left of our secrets.

Amazon ???? safe? no!

so all the enemy needs to do is take out the cloud base.
and All is lost.....

I can understand the making US all cloud base't.
control and easy to cut us off.
never Never use cloud!
unless its pics of cats.
ooh! look chilled porn on My cloud,
I Wounder How that got in their?
well they can do it any way.

fortune.com...

Cisco's Plan to Bring $67 Billion Back to the U.S. Could Be a Major Windfall for Its Investors

Hmmmm....???

Cisco

Don’t let one stand in the way of the other. Cisco brings together networking, security, analytics, and management across your multicloud environment to simplify, secure, and optimize how you work.

Well, seems like Cisco is probably the most capable of handling it with all their new SDN and data center technology they have been rolling out.