In my day job, I work in corporate IT. And have done so since I left the Army over 30 years ago. I have watched the computer industry go from huge, slow (compared to now), time share main frame systems to personal computers to mini-computers to corporate server farms to corporate virtual machines to the present where computing is dominated by the public cloud.
The public cloud, for those not in the IT industry, is a group of computer service providers that provide IT services (at cost) to almost every company in the US today, along with the Federal Government, as well as many foreign countries. These are the same services that these companies provided for themselves in the past in their own corporate data centers.
The public cloud is the subject of my article today.
In the modern computing world, almost every company needs some sort of computer system, and the federal government needs more computing power than most. The major providers of the public cloud services today are Microsoft (Azure), Amazon (AWS or Amazon Web Services), Google, and Oracle. Each of those provide the full stack of computer services: software, network, and computing hardware. In addition, Oracle is gaining a foothold within the other providers data centers thanks to its unmatched database services.
The cloud providers claim to provide more inexpensive services than on-premises computer systems, along with top notch support and guaranteed reliability. The corporate world these days is dominated by profits over any other factor. When a cloud provider promises lower prices than the cost of in house computer systems, and the same or better service, the corporate decision makers immediately jump on board with the public cloud.
I have been around the corporate world long enough to learn quite a bit about the decision making process of the typical corporate MBA. The thought process goes like this: are they cheaper right now? If so, do it. Future costs don’t matter.
The decision makers ignore some basic facts that those of us on the ground can see. For example, those cloud service providers are still paying for hardware and software and support personnel, just as each of their customers did in their own data center.
And, as the old saying goes, when you are looking for reliable, cheap, and fast in the computer world, you can only get two out of three. And that does not change in the cloud.
So these providers give the exact same services as large companies had in their own data center, but somehow its cheaper. And cloud service providers also need to generate a profit for their companies. In other words they are claiming a sufficient economy of scale to both provide corporate IT (and government) cheaper IT services than their current system, and at the same time generate a healthy profit for themselves.
Having worked with all of the various cloud providers, I have discovered that one way they cut costs is by hiring support from overseas where workers cost less than in the US. In my experience, you get what you pay for. Most of us remember the disastrous deterioration in quality when companies started off-shoring their software development and. It lasted about 10 years, after which they brought them back on shore because of the extremely low quality of the cheap off-shore support. If they wanted high quality off-shore support it was available. It just didn’t save them any money. I have no doubt the low price the cloud providers pay for support is one of the reasons for the substantial number outages that AWS has experienced. None for any substantial length of time, but they seem to happen about every six months or so.
Every company that moves to the cloud is promised reduced cost, plentiful support, and discounts to complete the move. The cloud service does not tell their customers that it is costly to move out of the cloud once you have moved in. Cloud service providers don’t charge to move data into the cloud, they charge to move data out.
Typically, large companies discover within five years of moving to the cloud that they are no longer saving money, rather it is costing them more. Smaller companies that don’t have sufficient demand to use economies of scale do sometimes save money in the cloud.
There is also a major problem with the public cloud that is being widely ignored. A problem that it is criminal to ignore. The data centers for the public cloud providers are a classic example of single points of failure. We already see this periodically when AWS and other providers have network difficulties. But should a bad actor go to the trouble to track down the location of even a half dozen of these public cloud data centers and then attack, they could realistically bring down the computer systems of a dozen major companies, as well as half the government with a single attack. That’s just from a simple physical attack that would require a bit of coordination.
The more dangerous attack is one that our enemies, especially the Chinese, specialize in. That is a cyber warfare attack. Not only are these cloud computing companies well known, but each provider also has its own software that is not only well known to the public, but also well documented. Well known and well documented in the software world means that people are already looking for ways to attack it.
Today’s Army runs on computers. Managing fuel, food, maintenance materials is all done on computer systems. Cripple the computer systems of the Department of Defense and the ability of the country to defend itself is crippled. Most of the DoD systems today are in the public cloud.
On the hardware side, every chip used in these systems are built in China (though president Trump is trying to rectify that). The Chinese are intimately familiar with these chips and no doubt know the best way to attack them, even if the old rumor that they have built in back doors to every processor is false.
The dream of every enemy of the United States is a successful decapitation strike, destroying the will and leadership of the country in a single strike. A very close second best to a decapitation strike would be a strike at the computer industry of the US, disabling everything in the US from power distribution to communication. And that could be done with a successful strike on the public cloud providers, whether with a cyber-attack or a physical attack.
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