You must log in or register to comment.
Microsoft is an American company. America is broken and corrupt. No country can trust America anymore.
Good. That’s the point.
Excellent, they should. Europe has many services that are already on par with American alternatives (certainly when it comes to Microsoft’s services), many are cheaper or even free, and actually respect our data.
We also have SUSE and OpenSUSE from Germany that work as very serviceable alternatives to Windows. I hope this wake up call that has been the US’s betrayal of all past allies leads EU tech to capitalize on it.
Microsoft promising to build infrastructure in the EU directly hurts American jobs. :-D lol Trumps Tarrifs that scared the world have responded by defending themselves, US companies boosting their economies by building there and then the US jobs will be needed less as the work they’re doing now witll be in the EU.
Trumps Tarrifs have directly boosted the economies of others while directly hurting ours and it has absolutely nothing to do with the tangible goods that Trump cares about.
Someone should tell Trump that Microsoft is out sourcing cloud business which is worth BILLIONS.
Trump probably thinks that’s woke libs creating clouds in the sky to fight climate change.
Amazon too, tell him Jeff Bezos is the biggest cloud seller on earth. Elon would jump at the chance to deal with his, uh, rival?
Just checked it’s worth almost $800 BILLION.
Y’all, I gotta admit I’m really starting to feel old. I still do not fully believe that cloud hosting is the answer for everyone. For businesses of certain sizes, I think running your own stuff and maintaining that IT knowledge within your org is invaluable, but I’m just an IT gremlin who can’t properly articulate his thoughts.
Anyone more knowledgeable care to weigh in?
That’s a broad topic where I would avoid making generalizations. It’s a matter of tradeoffs.
The key indicators I’d look at are, in no particular order:
- Cost. Does cloud hosting provide economies of scale that dramatically reduce operational costs?
- Risk. If your cloud provider hikes prices or turns out to be based in a hostile fascist dictatorship, can you easily switch to another offering?
- Liability. For better and more often for worse, companies love delegating business because it relieves them of liability if someone cocks it up. It’s a harsh reality that some SMEs have IT infrastructure that looks fine and inexpensive until they find out the hard way that their “IT person” doesn’t know what a firewall is.
- Accounting. Companies strongly prefer OpEx to CapEx due to the way modern accounting incentives, and cloud hosting is tailored to that.
- Practicality. If you want your email to sync to your phone abroad, you’ll need a cloud (though it could be a private cloud, but then I’d recommend a VPN which is more secure but less practical).
- Security. Does the NSA looking at all your files matter? For governments I would hope it does buuuuut…
Either way it goes, be mindful of blind spots. Companies often don’t (IMO) properly assess the risk of locking themselves into walled gardens due to short-termism. But at the same time IT gremlins such as myself tend to underestimate the costs we represent, not just as salaried employees but as people who might cock something up or leave behind us an undocumented mess that will costs hundreds of thousands to rebuild a few years from now.
If you’re thinking about cloud hosting, read up about how google accidentally deleted the whole of australias pension funds account and maybe think twice about if you can afford to lose everything you have in the cloud.
Of course, stuff like that doesn’t happen everyday or to everyone. But will knowing that you’ve just been fucked by random chance help you when it happens?
If you can, do selfhosting. If you can’t, at least have backups somewhere other than the cloud, because the cloud is nothing more than someone else’s computer. And if it’s someone else’s computer, the weakest link in the chain of security is always a human, who may or may not be an idiot or who may have a bad day.
If you’re in Google Cloud, you should have data backed up in something other than Google cloud, this is no different to having all your data in a basement which could be hit by natural disasters, randomware etc.
Hopefully the Unisuper example provides a good enough example for IT professionals to argue for funding for external backups and that the cloud isn’t a reason to not have them.
In my org email went to shit after they outsourced it and lost the institutional knowledge. Now we suddenly have random things happen, like a second layer of quarantine appearing, and nobody can explain it. Any support request is copy pasted forward and backward to the outsourcing provider. If the outsourcing provider’s response makes no sense it’s forwarded to you internally none the less, and without comment.
My colleagues tell me that back in the nineties we were running an X.400 email gateway in this very company before it was clear that Internet email would be the one to win the protocol wars. We were at the forefront of email developments then.
And we’re still a god damn tech company. We’re a registry (not registrar), network provider, security services provider, cloud provider, etc. But email is now apparently too hard for us, it’s a sad state of affairs.
Cloud hosting is not the answer for everyone.
It was a meme sold to the public by people richer than us so we give up even more control while opening another lifeline to our wallets.
It definitely is not for everyone.
Sure, the cloud is a cancer on computing. It may make some sense for large corporations but for small and medium business it takes away their agency. IT staff should be developed and in house coding should be the norm.
Allowing cloud and AI to run everything is a recipe for disaster.
They keep telling us the cloud allows us to scale. Ok, but why must everything be on it? Surely you could use both. Get our own hardware and if we have a flood of new customers stick the extra ones on the cloud server for a while. It’s all just VMs anyway.
Under Trump 2.0, some Europeans fear that storing their data in the bit barns of Microsoft, Google and AWS is no longer safe
It never was, and all the laws that were installed to make this appear legal were nothing but meaningless fig leaves.
Techies in Europe – who obviously have a vested interest in unsettling Microsoft stronghold on the market as AWS, Microsoft, and Google have upwards of a 70 percent share of the public cloud sector in the region – previously highlighted the potential dangers of US legislation.
I’ve mentioned this before as a criticism for Canadian boycotts of the US. Every large Canadian website, even Government and News use US cloud services. Every. One.
Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud, told us in March, “The Cloud Act grants US authorities access to cloud data hosted by US companies. It does not matter if that data is located in the US, Europe, or anywhere else.”
How was this allowed to happen? The minute that law was passed all sites that use them should have discontinued their contracts. JFC.
I think a company in Europe doesn’t give a shit that the US government can peek at their data. Their users might care but they certainly don’t.
What’s new is that they no longer trust the stability of the services long term. What if trump slaps a tariff, or asks Amazon to shut down access, or whatever bullshit passes through his head daily? You wouldn’t store your business on Russian servers, and they’re starting to realize the same applies to the US.
They have to give s shit, because they are ultimately responsible for the handling (and abuse, if it comes to that) of the data, and as European companies they are in easy reach of the European law.
Nah, as long as the actual servers are hosted in Europe, you’re compliant with GDPR and European law. The European company is not liable if the US government violates the EU-US framework.
The Processor is not, but the Controller is still required to guarantee appropriate security for personal data. Appropriate means running a risk assessment and deciding accordingly.
The problem is when in the EU we take as security responsible for healthcare people who handled IAM for Jira tops.
European data on European servers is fine, as long as American agencies can’t just access data on those (which one cannot rule out with American companies).
It’s like people still don’t know about Schrems II or the Cloud Act.
Or they somehow seriously think that the EU-US Data Privacy Framework resolves the issues that killed the EU–US Privacy Shield?
anyone remember the time the city of Munich was fully running on “Limux” until the bavarian greed kicked in and they switched back to Microsoft for 8000 jobs Bill promised them? I am sure the greed will kick in again. People are shit.
How was switching to MS supposed to create jobs? Genuine question.
Microsoft built their HQ in Munich as part of the “deal” as far as I remember. Something along those lines. The secret ingredient is corruption.
The CSU is full or such genius’
I remember. I think I was still on Slashdot back then – that’s how long ago it was.
Good.
Fuck Microsoft
They say they’ll fight thing in court as if we trust the courts to even respect the constitution anymore. You sat behind the clown on inauguration day, now reap what you sowed.
are you sure that Microsoft was there with Amazon, Google, Fecesbook and Xhitter?
I just installed Pop!OS :)
PopOS! is built by a US company BTW.
OpenSUSE is German, Mint is Irish and so is ZorinOS.
Have fun! May COSMIC evolve further and reaches the stars GNOME always aimed for.
Europe broke their own procurement laws in order to choose Microsoft for the cloud, its good that tariffs were enough for them to finally follow their own laws.
Im sorry, this is stupud! Customers are saying, “this service is unsafe, i dont trust my data isnt being used against me!” And their response is, “Dont worry, we habe a 5 point plan to make shure we have the uptime of a waffle-house! Our product will be so easy to access and it will stay that way forever!”
Oh no! Anyway…
Well if american tech were trying to provide a service and accumulate customers which they take care of then this would not be an issue. Their current method feels more like rape.
