Good.
Fuck Microsoft
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.
Appropriate means running a risk assessment and deciding accordingly
The risk assessment doesn’t require the company to assess the reliability of international diplomatic relationships. Having your data on EU soil (even under the care of a US company) is enough for compliance.
I assure you that is not true. Even in my “mild” domain of marketing analytics, vendors exist that are EU companies with EU storage also run by EU companies or they offer on-premise deployment. And serious companies with users that may signal personal details through behavioral data seek such solutions.
Vendors do exist but they are not required to do so. My last job was at a software vendor, GDPR compliant, ISO & SOC 2 certified, controlling personal data (including salary information) of EU citizens who were not opted in (their employer is the one on the contract). Not healthcare levels of sensitive but still pretty icky in terms of EU law and we had tons of German friends who are real sticklers for the rules. We stored everything on AWS infrastructure and it has never caused any issue during certification or security assessment by clients.
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).
There is no requirement for the company to think about that. The majority of GDPR-compliant companies still store on AWS/GCP, just on EU servers.
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?
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?
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?
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.
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.
Yes, a backup in a different location is necessary either way, I should have worded that better.
I still prefer selfhosting, if feasible. Having data sovereignty has it’s benefits.
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.
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.
It definitely is not for everyone.
There is no one answer that fits all. Where cloud will always be cheaper is data storage.
If you were to host everything on-prem, that would be a lot of capex. It would cost to maintain that as well. For on-prem, you have to think more about electricity, redundancy, backups, security, and so on. Anything you would need to do to build out a data center. Once you have it set up though, yes it would be cheaper.
For tech companies, this is already a non starter as they want to scale and scale fast. They also can’t just spend all their investors money, so they convert capex into opex instead.
Also, historically, IT is slow. Very slow. This is why there is a world of DevOps because developers became increasingly frustrated with how slow it is to provision infrastructure for them. To fix this, you could probably hire more people, but again, that’s an extra expensive that you can just now offset to cloud.
With cloud you can set up something in multiple data centers within minutes. If on-prem, you would need to have multiple physical locations of your own.
Another option is to rent out space in a data center, then you just buy your own hardware and do not have to worry about 80% of what would go into a data center. You would still need to set up these systems in a way that can scale for future use, which means more capex up front.
At the end of the day, there is no one size fits all. As you mentioned, most businesses could benefit in the long run by hosting their own stuff. I will say though, managing things like your own email server has become a nightmare. This is just a lot easier to let someone else manage. Then again, you have the concern of data storage, this is just easier and cheaper to host in cloud. Something like Google workspace or m365.
To put it another way, go to your boss and tell him you need to pay $2,000,000 up front for IT hardware. Now tell him you’ll need to pay $250,000 a year for the same services in cloud. What do you think they will go with?
I do hate that it’s come to this though, because I feel like people are losing knowledge. Only the people that build data centers these days will have that IT knowledge and you have people that can no longer tinker like we used to.
Yes, thank you, I think this is exactly what I’ve been feeling but unable to articulate properly.
I do feel there’s a great loss of knowledge in IT, but I’m also aware that I’m motivated by my own opinions and fear of job stability here. There are absolutely times when the cloud makes sense, and those arguments about capex v. opex nail it. I’d love to blame it entirely on greedy execs, but that upfront cost is hard to swallow for a new business, whether you’re planning on super/hyper scaling or not. Cohosting in a datacenter is a great option, but even then, most people simply won’t be willing to invest the time, as you put it.
I’ve had the luck of working for stable institutions like banks and biotech in the past where they built out their infrastructure for security and reliability properly and it was wonderful. I’ve also had the misfortune of working for hyperscaling startups with zero trust architecture built in Azure. It was a nightmare and I hated every day of it.
Like most things, the path forward is going to require a delicate balance, but there’s absolutely no fucking trusting Microsoft. When Europe says, “Hey, we’re getting nervous about your influence here” the response isn’t:
“In a time of geopolitical volatility, we are committed to providing digital stability. That is why today Microsoft is announcing five digital commitments to Europe. These start with an expansion of our cloud and AI infrastructure in Europe, aimed at enabling every country to fully use these technologies to strengthen their economic competitiveness. And they include a promise to uphold Europe’s digital resilience regardless of geopolitical and trade volatility.”
I mean, of course that’s what they’d say, but still. Fuck 'em.
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.
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.
Trump probably thinks that’s woke libs creating clouds in the sky to fight climate change.
Thinking that needing to build infrastructure that other countries provided is an economic boost is exactly the line of thought that the Magats use to justify Tariffs. It’s not true. The resources spent building server rooms and datacenters would be better used elsewhere.
Microsoft is an American company. America is broken and corrupt. No country can trust America anymore.
These idiots forgot that an “america first everyone else last” president might alienate a pretty big part of their customer base, i.e. the rest of the world
It’s not even America first. It’s Trump and maybe the .00001% first and fuck everyone else.
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.
I remember. I think I was still on Slashdot back then – that’s how long ago it was.
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’
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.
SUSE? non-linux OS?
It is Linux! Honestly mentioning SUSE was a mistake since most people aren’t gonna use that. That would be for enterprises or government.
OpenSUSE, particularly openSUSE Aeon is the one I would use if I wasn’t too knowledgeable about Linux. It just works out of the box, and it’s an atomic distro so a lot of the guides out there for other atomic distros apply to Aeon.
Also zypper is a fantastic package manager.
I just installed Pop!OS :)
Have fun! May COSMIC evolve further and reaches the stars GNOME always aimed for.
PopOS! is built by a US company BTW.
OpenSUSE is German, Mint is Irish and so is ZorinOS.
I agree. But I think we can make an exception for some FOSS software.
When the US government demands that System76 hands over all info they have on the people who use their products, or decides to ban access to US software from countries Trump has decided in his mind are “playing unfair”, let’s see how far PopOS being FOSS takes us.
Sucks that EU privacy protections only apply to corporations, and the governments are going for full government backdoors in everything possible.
I’m SO happy I chose to switch to Linux as my daily driver.
Oh no! Anyway…
Good. That’s the point.
