- “Cloud First”: To move federal agencies to the cloud, the government created a program known as FedRAMP, whose job was to ensure the security of new technology.
- Security Breakdown: ProPublica found that FedRAMP authorized a Microsoft product called GCC High to handle sensitive government data, despite years of concerns about its security.
- Potential Conflict of Interest: The government relies, in part, on third-party firms to vet cloud technology, but those firms are hired and paid by the company being assessed.
I work in health insurance. We are rolling out AI. It’s in the cloud so all your data is literally stored on Amazon servers. Was told it’s secure because we have a private tenant. No I hate this shit.
Same here. I feel like I’m taking fucking crazy pills.
Why? Why are all our financials on OneDrive? Why is our system setup being done with a Entra-federated third party tool? Why does CoPilot have access to my email with possible HIPAA-privileged data in it? Why do we have to shut off our servers on the weekend if it saves so much money and doesn’t cost anything when idle?
I can’t believe these morons gave away personal computing because they just didn’t want to deal with having on-site hardware, and it doesn’t even save any money.
It’s a liability shield. “It’s not our fault. Sue Amazon.”
Capital expense vs operating expense. Same reason you might lease a car instead of buying.
A car eventually get paid off. These services do not. They bill forever and get more expensive every year. And nobody gets held responsible for anything.
True, but you also get hardware replacement every year, in the same way that you can get a new car with a new lease.
Most companies would be fine with not having surplus hardware to offload down the road, because it’s depreciated so much, and if they’re offloading it it’s probably because they’ve gone out of business.
Clearly it’s not the real reason one would presume, saving money. Selling data may be.
This isn’t surprising to me in the slightest. I’ve been part of a small team tasked with assessing products and services for larger enterprises before and they’d almost always look over our findings nod a bunch and then go with the company whose rep took them out to a fancy dinner or gave them kickbacks.
The conflict of interest angle here is wild. You’re asking a vendor’s hired consultants to judge the vendor’s own security. That’s not a bug in FedRAMP, it’s the entire architecture.
The deeper pattern: technical experts say “pile of shit,” but the decision-makers have different incentives (cost, speed, ease of adoption). Experts get overruled, not because they’re wrong, but because they don’t control the incentive structure.
This happens everywhere. Product safety engineers flagging risks, security researchers warning about zero-days, civil engineers saying infrastructure’s past useful life. The signals exist. The system just doesn’t care.
Are you a bot?
Ignore the downvotes, that account is 100% a bot. Every single reply looks generated, plenty even have em-dashes.
CLOUD is such a fucking rip off!! Anyone with any sense can see that.
My favorite part of Amazon’s Web Service is AWS Outposts.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA
They will put the AWS cloud in your data center.
You will rent AWS servers and the rack they sit in. You will administer them, power and cool them, handle all the connectivity to the servers and you get to run all the software…
It is such a fucking rip off.
I found out that Azure DevOps can be hosted in this same manner. You pay a license fee to host and maintain it yourself.
I was shocked. Lmao.
This is because DevOps is the updated version of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. You have always been able to self host it because that used to be the only option.
I only found out because a colleague spent an entire day maintaining the server we host it on. The notion of having to pay to do all the BS operative work around using that shitty platform is so silly to me. If anything it feels like Microsoft should pay us.
I see the approach of Outposts, just don’t know if I agree with it. Part of the point is it lets you have a dedicated, isolated, on-premise platform without the need to train existing engineers/admins on a secondary technology like Nutanix, ProxMox, etc.
So your calculus should include the cost to rent vs dedicated head count (and let me tell you, companies fucking hate headcount).
Now all that being said, I have yet to see a situation where it really is more cost effective, especially due to the things you mentioned.
on-premise
You mean “private cloud”, right? No one who can afford outpost will be putting this in their server closet. It’ll go in the datacenter.
“Private cloud” has always been a synonym for “on-premise”. I’ve managed Datacenter infrastructure for decades and always referred to it to on-premise before private cloud even became a term. It basically is referring to Datacenter space you own or rent vs another company’s servers and DCs.
Hell, I’ve worked in companies where they had Datacenter space in the same building as their office (and not small either, one was 32 racks, another was almost 200). So that very much was “on-premise”
The whole point of “cloud” was to eliminate data centers.
If there was a low latency need for a private cloud, of course you put it as close as possible.
They do that because there are some things that you can’t put in the cloud, like HIPAA protected data. It’s absolutely a rip off, but that was their solution.
You absolutely can store HIPAA data in the cloud.
Latency is one of the big selling points for Outposts. They have customers wanting to control industrial equipment from their cloud resources, but the nearest AWS region is too far away to provide the low latency connectivity they need. With Outposts, they get the cloud, but with on-prem network latency.
There is no certification process in place for using a cloud to store HIPAA data. It even says that on the page that you linked. Legally, any organization that used this service would be opening themselves to further liability under HIPAA.
Tell that to literally every hospital, medical provider, and insurer in the United States.
They’re all using AWS, and OneDrive.
That’s news to me. Every time to vendor tries to get me to switch to their cloud product I tell them to get lost. I’m not willingly handing over patient data to these clowns, I’ve seen how bad they are at security.
I am a software developer who does custom EMR software specifically because the places I work for can’t use the cloud. But okay I will try…
can you site the part of HIPAA that says that?
There’s no certification for HIPAA defined in law.
No I can’t cite something that doesn’t exist. I literally just said there isn’t one… so I am not sure what your point is.
Legally, any organization that used this service would be opening themselves to further liability under HIPAA.
What legal violation? Because the law says nothing about that.
what the law does allow, is data storage with a BAA.
What?!? The entire purpose of HIPAA is to put liability on misuse of data. At this point, I have no fucking clue what your point is.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
For even more fun, look into the FAA’s “regulation” of Boeing, which was effectively “do you super duper pinky promise that you followed the rules?”
Seriously, the verification was done by Boeing and then reported back to the FAA
Crony capitalism at its finest.
