IBM Calls Amazon Unprepared to Secure Intelligence Data
September 23, 2013
Grazed from NextGov. Author: Joseph Sparks.
Against the backdrop of a $150 million lawsuit over a contract to build a secure computer cloud for the U.S. intelligence community, an IBM executive swiped at competitor Amazon last week, calling the company’s cloud services unreliable and not up to government standards. “Amazon’s definition of reliability doesn’t measure up to what the federal government needs for mission critical workloads,” Andrew Maner, managing partner of IBM’s federal cloud business told Nextgov.
Amazon is suing the government in an effort to claw back a contract it initially won to provide cloud computing services to the CIA and other intelligence agencies. The CIA later canceled and re-bid that contract after IBM complained to the Government Accountability Office…
GAO found the CIA gave Amazon an unfair advantage because it agreed to modify some terms of the contract after it had already been awarded. Notably, the agency agreed to weaken a requirement that all software in its cloud be verifiably free from computer viruses that might let unauthorized people see intelligence data. Amazon asked that it only be required to vouch for software it had built itself, not for third party and open source software…
Read more from the source @ http://www.nextgov.com/cloud-computing/2013/09/ibm-calls-amazon-unprepared-secure-intelligence-data/70642/?oref=ng-HPriver