Posture

Posted on April 21, 2011 by Tim Harder

People who write software write bugs. Anyone who has been a producer or consumer of technology knows this maxim to be true. Its how you deal with these exceptions through redundancy, fault vectors, recovery scenarios and managed customer experience that are important.  Today, there are many organizations impacted by the outage of a contemporary public cloud provider. Marketing teams around the globe are gearing up with subtle barbs, whisper talking points, and placed opinion pieces with disparaging tones. I find the approach (and the outage) a bit unfortunate because I believe it has the potential to pause the pace of innovation by organizations who leverage the cloud infrastructure to serve their ultimate end users. With any, radical paradigm shift, there are going to be bumps along the way. In my experience its how you deal with them and engender customer support that people remember.  What I do hope comes of this is a spirited debate about the merits of cloud architecture, which applications can benefit from its use and what risk profile/governance is required for continued operation.

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Why Amazon pulled the cloud out from under WikiLeaks

Posted on December 8, 2010 by Tim Harder

Unless you’ve been in hiding in a cave somewhere, you’ve probably heard about WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

The WikiLeaks Website is an international organization that publishes submissions of classified, leaked and otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous news sources. Julian Assange is the site’s founder and editor in chief.

WikiLeaks has run afoul of multiple governments in the past few years in large part to the leaked documents and classified information that it features as content.

In March 2003, they released a copy of the standard operating procedures for the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. During the 2008 presidential election, WikiLeaks reported the contents of a Yahoo email account belonging to Sarah Palin, a vice presidential nominee. In October 2010, WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of documents relating to the Iraq War.

Most recently, WikiLeaks released diplomatic cables at the end of November. The leaked documents contained inflammatory and sensitive information about diplomatic proceedings, somewhat embarrassing information about world leaders and other information that experts felt could strain diplomatic relations between the United States and many other countries.

Needless to say, WikiLeaks hasn’t made many government friends, inside the U.S. or elsewhere.

Then, on December 2, something interesting happened. Amazon.com, the company providing cloud infrastructure services for WikiLeaks, severed its ties with the organization.

It’s not uncommon for bad actors to be run off by cloud providers in the past. Service providers have taken action to end their relationships with customers caught using their services to conduct criminal activities. The terms of services that govern most of the cloud providers offer an escape clause for the operator if the service is being used for anything illegal or if it has the potential to tarnish the service provider’s brand.

Now, I’m not a proponent of publicizing information deemed classified by the U.S. Government, especially when that information can be viewed as a threat to the national security. However, this seems to walk the line of censorship.

The actual legality of leaking these documents is tricky. I am by no means an expert on the legal aspects, but these documents were leaked by people and on servers located in countries where significant protection is in place for both media outlets and their sources. That means that Amazon could have effectively booted an organization off of their cloud infrastructure that hadn’t really committed a criminal activity.

If WikiLeaks did something to violate Amazon’s terms of service, they were well within their rights to terminate their relationship. But as a publishing outlet, it’s questionable that WikiLeaks was doing anything wrong. They simply created a platform designed to share and express information. Amazon probably found a loophole on “brand tarnishing” and used it to justify pulling the plug.

But why did they really do it? I think it was a desire to curry favor with the government that led them to pull the plug on WikiLeaks.

Just one day before booting WikiLeaks, Amazon made a major talent acquisition, bringing the person onboard who formerly led Microsoft’s federal business to help sell cloud and other services to the government. Amazon is competing for a handful of government contracts and is clearly looking to ramp up their business with the federal government.

Now if you’re looking to sell cloud services to the federal government, it’s probably not a good idea to be the cloud service provider for the online news organization that has repeatedly and recently angered this country’s leaders by releasing sensitive and classified information.

At the end of the day, what WikiLeaks has done for the sake of transparency in government was ill-advised and potentially harmful for America and homeland security. However, Amazon pulling the plug on WikiLeaks appears to be not an act of civil duty, but a financially-motivated and self-interested act of censorship.

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A Cloudy Forecast – IT giants learn how to lobby DC

Posted on October 14, 2010 by Tim Harder

I’m not just jazzed about cloud computing because it’s a cool use of technology – although it is! A big reason I’m excited about the federal cloud is the potential is has to disrupt the typical federal IT buy cycle, and accelerate time to value for government dollars.

But this isn’t exciting to everyone. While technologists love disruptive technology, businessmen don’t. That’s because when there is disruption, there is the possibility for incumbents in any market to lose profits and/or market share. And no entrenched company wants that to happen.

So unfortunately, some big names in cloud are looking to cozy up to the Washington way of doing things. Case in point – Amazon and Google. Those two companies have favorable cloud pedigrees in the private sector, and have been making a lot of noise about the benefits on the cloud for government.

But they’re not taking any chances getting their messages through. Both companies have greatly increased the amount of money they are spending on DC lobbying. In fact, Google has upped it’s spend 41% in Q2, according to TechCrunch. And most of us remember the story back in April when leaked emails revealed that Andrew McLaughlin, former chief lobbyist for Google and now deputy CTO in the Obama Administration, was staying in regular contact with his former employer. The firm provided over 800k in contributions to the Obama campaign and helped to secure staffers key appointment positions including : Transition Staff, Director of Citzen Participation, Head of Social Innovation, Council of Science and Technology Advisors and Deputy Technology Czar.

In Amazon’s case, they’ve spent over $1M lobbying to date in 2010. This compares to  spending only $1.34M in all of 2008, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Federal customers need to recognize that the cloud should deliver not just better performance, but a better price. They need to demand a better product and a better procurement process from their chosen cloud provider.

One irony here in that trying to protect their interests, the incumbents are missing a huge business opportunity. Contracting for cloud services in the right way means a whole new kind of partnership between government and integrator – one that benefits both parties. The first company that lets go of the past and embraces the new cloud model will have a huge, first mover advantage. It’s the right thing to do, and will pay off handsomely for both the Feds and that company’s shareholders.

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