Department of Interior dishes out $10bn for cloudy IT The Department of Interior has announced a multi-billion dollar cloud procurement round that will see the land management organization shell out a maximum of $10bn across contracts with 10 major IT vendors. The pork barrels IT contracts were announced by the organization on Wednesday, and will see Aquilent, AT&T, Autonomic …
AWS seems to be doing a better job than most enterprises on security. They tackled it from the start as a high-priority issue, given their deployment model and multi-tenancy.
NSA could learn from them!
Given this deal underpins a huge portion of government IT, since Bureau of the Interior provides services across a lot of other departments, this is a big issue, and I'm sure it will be heavily scrutinized.
With so many legacy apps written in COBOL, did IBM get their piece of this deal based on being the best host for those apps. After all, they consider mainframes as ideal cloud machines, and for COBOL it's Hobson's choice.
Of course, most of us don't consider COBOL+mainframe as even close to cloudy, so maybe IBM is crowing only to the few lovers of COBOL who are left!
(Remember IBM is trying to get out of the COTS server business!)
"Of course, most of us don't consider COBOL+mainframe as even close to cloudy, so maybe IBM is crowing only to the few lovers of COBOL who are left!"
Oh really?
Core application logic hosted on remote server. Check
Multiple processors with automatic failover and load balancing to other processors. Check.
Automatic DR to another machine, possibly located on another site. Check.
"Processing on demand" giving more processors hosting an application if more users using it. Check.
5 9's availability available off the shelf for at least 3 decades. That's not a check point, that simply a fact of mainframes (IBM, Fujitsu, Unisys, whatever) have supplied for decades
BTW COBOL supports indirect calling of a procedure, allowing a version of the array of procedure calls so beloved of C/C++ programmers.
You call it a cloud, I'd just call it a remote hosted application server which can match mainframe capabilities, not yet exceed them.
But I'll bet they make sure it's hosted in the US.
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So I guess that the US version of Peter Rabbit would go something like this:
Mrs Rabbit, to Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter: "Now don't get up to any mischief. You may go into the forest, or down the lane, but don't go into Mr. Macgregor's garden or the DOI will put you into a pie."
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