{"id":743261,"date":"2013-03-24T12:00:57","date_gmt":"2013-03-24T16:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=623634"},"modified":"2013-03-24T12:00:57","modified_gmt":"2013-03-24T16:00:57","slug":"the-week-in-cloud-reports-of-a-spy-cloud-from-amazon-and-lotsa-outages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/743261","title":{"rendered":"The week in cloud: reports of a spy cloud from Amazon and lotsa outages"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amazon reportedly to build CIA secret cloud<\/h2>

Probably the biggest news of \u00a0the week was a Federal Computer Week report<\/a> that public cloud leader Amazon is building a private cloud for the CIA<\/a>. Citing unnamed sources, the story put the worth of the contract at about $600 for 10 years. What was unclear — since no one is speaking officially — is if this completely separate from Amazon’s existing Govcloud, although that appears to be the thinking.<\/p>

\"fingerprint<\/a>As the exec of one cloud competitor put it — this shows that Amazon will, for the right price, get into the private cloud business.<\/p>

CIA spokespeople would not comment; Amazon did not respond to request for comment. Asked last week at GigaOM’s Structure Data<\/a> event about the report, CIA CIO Ira “Gus” Hunt said he could not comment now but “maybe someday.”<\/p>

A bad week for cloud-based services<\/h2>

\"Google<\/a>The week started off rough for many Google Drive users<\/a> who reported ttheir service was down<\/a>, As Engadget<\/em> put it, if there’s ever a time you don’t want your shared documents to go inoperable it’s Monday morning. There were additional\u00a0intermittent troubles with the cloud storage system for two days.<\/p>

On Wednesday, it was LinkedIn’s turn to flake out<\/a>. The professional social networking site was down for about 45 minutes over a two-hour period, according to InfoWorld<\/em>.<\/p>

Not to be an apologist for cloud services — God knows I was ticked off with problems with Google Drive last week –but it helps to remember how many times on-premises applications go awry.<\/p>

My last employer ran an email system from a huge vendor. And we had multiple multi-day outages every<\/em> year. I’m sure the vendor (it’s in the great northwest and is now trying to forklift its users to cloud ) would probably blame the implementation, the on site admin guys would beg to differ. Bottom line however was that the poor schmuck end-users couldn’t get their mail. Moral of the story? Technology can fall down no matter how it’s delivered.<\/p>
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