Hacked, pwnd and your tax money stolen in 5, 4, 3…
The federal government plans to shut 40 percent of its computer centers over the next four years to reduce its hefty technology budget and modernize the way it uses computers to manage data and provide services to citizens.
[…]
The federal government is the largest buyer of information technology in the world, spending about $80 billion a year. The Obama administration, in plans detailed Wednesday, is taking aim at some of that by closing 800 of its sprawling collection of 2,000 data centers. The savings, analysts say, will translate into billions of dollars a year and acres of freed-up real estate.
[…]
In an interview, Vivek Kundra, chief information officer for the federal government, explained that the data center consolidation was part of a broader strategy to embrace more efficient, Internet-era computing. In particular, the government is shifting to cloud computing, in which users use online applications like e-mail remotely, over the Internet. These cloud services can be provided by the government to many agencies or by outside technology companies.
Tapping cloud computing services, Mr. Kundra said, could save the government an additional $5 billion a year, reducing the need for individual government agencies to buy their own software and hardware.
Considering how many times my Yahoo and G-mail accounts have had the “Your account may have been compromised” page forcing me to change my password, I wonder what manner of important info the government will be storing on web mail servers.
all your database belong to us
Trusting a private corporation to profit off the maintenance of government data is probably the most sound idea I’ve ever heard. I wonder what the going rate will be for social security numbers.
Is this peanut aware that cloud computing is still just computers connected to networks?
Is it better to know you are placing your data into an insecure system, or into one you think is secure? Should government be allowed to keep secret (ie-secure) information. If gov was not allowed to keep secure info, would it want/keep different information? Storage/what is stored is interactive in that way.
Pro’s and Con’s to all we do.
I thought Vivek Kundra quit – at least he announced he was planning to leave the administration several weeks ago. When is he going to go away to Harvard to get a real degree?
http://politico.com/news/stories/0611/57115.html
From thread topic:
“could save the government an additional $5 billion a year” … out of … “$80 billion”
They close 40% of the data centers to save 6%?
@#4 To be fair, dummy appears to understand that part and offers workers local computers with no software to maintain or pay for and no expensive server facilities. That is where the savings are.
However, what he does have no clue about (as a person with no real technological experience, just social-web-savvy [see his real resume]) is Security and the consequences of doing what he proposes in light of security issues.
However, he is not the only “danderhead”. Even highly respectful and security savvy people like famous Leo Laporte are giddy over possibility to do all Government business online (see some of his quotes on recent Security Now podcasts). People are too enamored by convenience to note that although clunky things like paper medical records and paper mortgage documents win on security front. Effort and need for physical presence to obtain and tamper with just few of those is high vs. profit (though some criminals would do it). Put systems like that in the Cloud and small electronic effort of breaking in nets tremendous amount of profit, worth every penny to break in.
Finally there is aspect of responsibility this Administration hates. What better than to claim every problem on those businesses providing the services Government should never have got into…
#1 Jasontheodd said: “Considering how many times my Yahoo and G-mail accounts have had the “Your account may have been compromised” page forcing me to change my password”
I’ve used GMail as my primary email for 6 years and Flickr (yahoo password) for almost as long. I’ve never seen a statement that my account may have been compromised. I wonder what Jasontheodd has been doing wrong to cause these notifications.
This guy’s math never works. Everything else he says can be likened to a herd of cows on Raw cabbage. It aint pretty.
and it smells.
At one level it sounds like a smart thing to do but mainly with less critical information systems.
The FAA can’t even update the aviation network or a fancy new automated airport and make it work the way they are supposed to work.
This thing is going to be a security nightmare. I keep hearing gossip about the gov. setting up a non public network but keeping it secure is going to be a bit of a problem. I’m not sure they have the smarts to handle it.
I do know that some of the more vital military computers didn’t used to have a direct physical connection to the public net or so I was told. A true stand alone system can be kind of hard to mess with.
Yeah, I can just see the IRS trusting the cloud.
We’ve got a whole alphabet soup of agencies that are not going to trust S.F.A. to the cloud.
CIA, DEA, DHS, DoD, FBI, INS, IRS, NSA, TSA, USAMRID, and a whole lot of other agencies who have lots of reasons to take the idiot and nail his ass to a wall…
In udder woids, fuggedaboudid
Listen to Vivian people! He be smart and he were appointed by “Mr. Technology” himself, Barry O’bama, and Barry, he be a Nobel prize wiener, and you don’t do what he axe you to do, you be racist!
Outsourcing …
I have no real opinion on this and was looking for some tech-intelligent comments.
Instead, we get “Obama is doing it. So, I’m against it.”
Any clear headed thinkers here who can give some insight on this?
I apologize.
I see now that a couple people made decent comments — I just got irritated at the kneejerk “no we can’t” reactionaries.
I thought this guy left after two years of doing nothing. He was never qualified for the job and has made other foolish pronouncements.
Hey, we could write his position out of the budget. A hundred grand here a hundred grand there, pretty soon you’re talking semi-real money.
Oh, and Cloud Computing might lead to global cooling…
My first thought was what major “cloud computing” company is this guy hoping to land a job at.
When the cable/fiber/T1 is cut, we get the day off. Someone please hand me the pliers.
It save a lot of time if the government simply transferred all our personal data to the government of Nigeria, and all remaining classified data to WikiLeaks.
The future looks more and more like Rollerball.
40% in 4 years? Yeah right, not unless that 40% is already useless or low density. And I doubt that.
Playing the Information Architecture playbook. Externalise infrastructure but internalise content creation. Problem is, once you externalise infrastructure you lose control over how it is utilised. And who else uses it.
# 17 GregAllen, ‘Any clear headed thinkers here who can give some insight on this?’
Vivek Kundra’s vision and insight, in his own words:
“And think about this, I know there are people on Second Life right now, but imagine a Universe where you have the Star-Trek holodeck where you could literally ask the computer, err, to act or ask questions to get answers. In the same way, if you look at some of these software companies they’ve made it sooo complicated to interact with their technologies. Ah and, err, at the same time the underlying architecture and the platform, it’s almost a chicken and egg question because alot of it was built and architected around bandwidth constraints therefore you had to deploy technologies that were much more complicated in terms of interacting and communicating. Now, as broadband deployment, and more importantly, err, if you look at the megabits-per-second, err, how much, err, how much information can we get through the pipeline is going to be so important and, as new and new software and techologies are being introduced, what you going to see is huuuge-change from how applications are architected from skip-logic to video and much more human ways of interacting with these applications rather than, err, binary or COBOL ways of interacting.”
#9 happened multiple times after the whole Sony PlayStation network fiasco. There were thousands of attempts to access my email accounts using the password for my Sony account. They weren’t the same, so they never got in, but SOP at both companies is to make a schmuck change his password every time it recognizes an attempt. Sounds reasonable till the hundredth time you have to change your password just to see your mail.
Well he’s an idiot..next subject…ROFL!
#26 – Well, that helps. O’Bama hired a Star Trek Convention reject to take the IT reins of our country. Wonder if he wore his Spock ears to work?
“architected”?????
Makes sense and the government should be first in line for cloud computing. It’s where large enterprises are going if not already there.
Glad to see the Obama administration hired someone to revamp the piece of shit, Western Union style managed by Cheney through his fax machine.
Great ! Now hackers will CONTROL THE GOVERNMENT !!! Expect BREATHLESSLY STUNNING EMBEZZLEMENTS !!! And total GOVERNMENT SHUT-DOWN – NO REPUBLICANS NECESSARY – WHEN THE CLOUD GOES BLUE SCREEN !!! ARGH !!!
I have three email accounts. One for work and one with two other venders one of which is google. As soon as I got the google account I got a couple of pieces of pure spam but since I hadn’t used the account except as a drop box to send stuff to myself for later use I’m not clear on how they got my address and nobody is now sending me spam to that account.
I have one legacy account with the original pass word and while it should have been hacked a long time ago that does not appear to have occurred.
The fastest way to get past my work pass word would, in theory, be to get a warrant. I followed the rules and I have updated it.