I feel like people are missing some context here, this isn’t about Google Workspace vs Office 365. After the JEDI contract controversy, the DoD switched strategies to procure from multiple cloud vendors: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/release/article/268299...
So glad to see this. Military IT has been atrocious. I viewed the Navy Marine Corp Internet (NMCI) as damn near treasonous levels of awful when I got out a decade ago and assumed little improvement with the way contracts are done and the entrenched vendors. Happy to see Google win this not just because I prefer the solution now to MS, but that some change is happening. I still can’t believe we spent $7T on the global war on terror and no one is asking questions.
I agree that military IT has been atrocious. I disagree that NMCI was "damn near treasonous levels of awful." NMCI was a large, Department of the Navy (DoN) -wide contract that had incredibly challenging tasks it needed to complete to be successful. The first few years were bad but it got better over time and, by the time the next transition was set to happen, it was running pretty smoothly.
When people complained about not getting the things they wanted, what they were really railing against was the fact that they didn't get what they wanted all the time anymore; the military grew accustomed to telling someone "I want X" and it happened, regardless of cost, lifecycle sustainment, security, etc. NMCI forced the DoN to develop and articulate requirements properly, write good contracts, budget for software and hardware sustainment, and generally operate professionally.
In short, I would take an NMCI computer and enterprise services from 2010 versus a Marine Corps Enterprise Network computer and enterprise services from 2022 any day of the week.
Disclosure: I have been a Marine Corps Communications Officer for almost 20 years; starting before NMCI. I worked at the regional and enterprise levels to transition ownership back from the NMCI program/contractor to government owned.
It's quite possible that NMCI works just as poorly now. In my office we have desktops running Windows 10 on 8gb RAM and HDD (spinning drives.) It should surprise no one that Windows 10 has bloated beyond the capability of slow hard drives to keep up; I maintain maxed out disk read utilization at all times, and consequent here maximum number of browser tabs before lag kicks in is none. Outlook is even worse than Chrome (new official browser of DoD websites.) The fastest way to check email at work is to go out to my car and connect laptop via Hotspot for OWA. Next best way is to go home and use OWA there, with using the work computer the slowest option by about 10 minutes.
War on terror or war on anything. It's a complex thing. To hold on to power, a country must be constantly training their war machine. Wars are the best training for war. So say $7T is the cost of retaining power. What would the cost be of losing that power?
Despite this grim perspective, I have hope for the future of humanity.
I know I shouldn't type this but isn't it weird that Google remains the last tech giant that hasn't had a major breach. I mean small breaches based on CSRF issues and what not, but nothing like those million record breaches that EVERYONE is afflicted by. Probably part of the reason the Army chose Google.
I think I would normally disagree with a govt. agency using a cloud platform, but it might actually be MORE secure than what they can do themselves.
China broke into google and surveilled targets. Like, actually spied on dissidents through their gmail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
This greatly sped up projects to protect user data from external threats.
Heather Adkins who leads security (and is one of those ultra-longtimers) brought a number of senior eng for internal, ultra-private meetings where they showed the eng leadership exactly what had happened. I wasn't invited but at that time, sat near the exit door and their faces were just ... aghast at the consequences of what had just happened as a function of the systems they built.
The snowden dumps also showed that the NSA had packet traces of BigTable RPCs which was quite an eye-opener and definitely sped up privacy projects.
China breached Google a while back. The NSA also hacked google wide open by decrypting/man in the middle SSL/TLS. I remember when that was disclosed Google went on a rampage implementing site-to-site/machine-to-machine SSL so that it's not relying on single point of failure SSL/TLS termination.
A lot of people have selective memory when it comes to security issues.
And those breaches are multimillion record breaches.
The China one was bad enough for google to terminate the entire link to china and pull out entirely.
Risky Business posited last week on their podcast that since Operation Aurora[1], where China hacked a bunch of companies, Google has just pulled out their checkbook to ensure that it never happened again. And it seems like they have successfully done so.
> I know I shouldn't type this but isn't it weird that Google remains the last tech giant that hasn't had a major breach.
> nothing like those million record breaches that EVERYONE is afflicted by.
Why do you think that? Google has had several major breaches.
There was a google+ bug that exposed info on 52.5 million users, one on 500,000 users' data, and other disclosures. There have also been corrupted apps on the play store, like Brain Test that infected at least a million devices with difficult to remove malware. A decade ago there were about 5 million Google passwords leaked online.
It depends on your definition of security. I go with confidentiality, ineltegrity and availability.
They continue to fail badly on all three of those fronts from an end user perspective. However, most of their problems on that front are self-inflicted / intentional cost saving / revenue generating.
Edit. Examples:
Sent box message injection in gmail getting (edit: people) fired. People sneak a forged sexual harassment message (or whatever) to the victim past the gmail spam filter, put the victim's address in the from header, and then corporate IT checks the account, sees the "outgoing" message in the victim account and fires the victim.
Google drive data loss (many examples in web search results).
Permanent account lockouts through no fault of the end user.
Google just posted a 5 part documentary series on IT security within Google and covers their response to operation Aurora. It’s pretty light on technical details but is a fairly entertaining watch.
Part of why this doesn't happen is because if someone were to hack Google and they got caught, Google will simply disable all their services for that person.
Late last year Google got FedRAMP High certification for Workspaces and Public Cloud. What this means is that, rather than have to use a "Government" version of Office365, and a "Government" version of AWS, and potentially even other versions for contractors, you can instead just use regular Google services for everything, at the highest levels. Managing different vendors and products and clearance is a nightmare. This is a potential game changer.
So the Army uses it but if you're a government contractor you can't use it because you can't get a NIST 800-53 or CMMC compliant configuration on Workspace...
Before anyone tells me that Workspace is FedRAMP compliant: Yes, I know, but they do not expose the controls necessary for non-government users to be compliant.
Does anyone actually think this is endorsement? At this point Google is the 2022 version of 1998 Microsoft. Big, slow, and dumb. We all know we're getting fucked by them yet not hard enough to quit yet. Soon.
Doesn’t the rest of the DoD uses Office? Is this not going to cause a bunch of interagency drama from having to convert documents from Docs to Office? (or is there some big button you can press in the GSuite admin console to say “make everyone save everything in Office format, yes, I know some features will work weird.”)
It is a weird choice, especially considering how every computer assigned to an end user is a Windows Desktop, Especially Widnows 10 as of 2017 - https://www.army.mil/standto/archive/2016/05/10/
I can see how licensing for Office is "expensive" but this is the DoD so that should be the least concerning issue.
Training is touched in the PR, but, it is not 1:1, especially for excel spreadsheets with macros, pivot tables or integration to PowerBi, which again is Office 365. I doubt FPA/Accounting and such are going to move over to Google.
For tech, same ,I don't see it happening. I could see an excuse as "more secure" as the identity is entirely cloud based, and you don't need to label/track content via Azure AIP/DRM'ish and it's easily accessibly within google, but that is entirely possible on O365 after it's tuned for that. I also am curious about general mail routing and such, no more exchange? No more outlook? (Well, I guess you could use outlook via imap, but then again what's the point?)
This PR just has me asking more questions, especially since all of the options AFAIK for gsuite require an active internet connection and a modern/newer browser. The same org that uses Panasonic Toughbooks, is going to have a have to use an "offline" mode of gsuite.
I work in a company that has forced Workspaces upon us and it randomly is a nightmare. Tons of functionality you get in Excel is not there. It is a complete nightmare adjusting access to random files. You often end up with files and folders "owned" by a user who no longer exists and then we have to get the central IT to go fix it.
Ugh. Everything being browser based with crap desktop clients is the worst. They also want to constantly share crap via Google Drive and, unless I have missed something major, you can't run Google Drive, in Windows at least, under multiple signed in users with the same drive letter. You'll just get access denied errors. THAT makes shortcuts and all a complete fucking nightmare.
I have to often shrug when my users have issues and send in a report to the Japanese head office and hope they respond timely. I know /that/ isn't a workspaces fault, but it just compounds things.
Has anyone had issues with normal INDEX/MATCH stuff in Google Sheets?
I was actually OK with moving from Excel to Google Sheets since the coverage of functions seemed mostly ok, minus all the new cool shit they added in one of the more recent releases (XLOOKUP, etc) but I literally tried a trivial INDEX/MATCH with a simple 5x20 matrix of price values and literally could not get it to work even though the identical "code" worked in Excel.
Really, really frustrating. I was working at a hedge fund at the time and I was simultaneously working on a real time portfolio dashboard as a web app, and needed to also have a stopgap solution in the form of a spreadsheet for people to play with and debugging differences in Google's spreadsheet function implementations and Excel's was infuriating
I'm always impressed at how difficult the Workspace Admin Console makes doing literally anything. It's like I'm thrown into a database with an aggressively denormalized schema and expected to figure out how to piece together complete records by hand via queries.
Meanwhile across the Atlantic in Europe, Google and Microsoft are being removed from classrooms, governments, and military agencies in favor of open source private clouds such as Nextcloud with Collabora office. This is due to GDPR and data sovereignty. Private clouds is what these companies fear as features mature.
[+] [-] faizshah|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffcore|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poof131|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewpc|3 years ago|reply
When people complained about not getting the things they wanted, what they were really railing against was the fact that they didn't get what they wanted all the time anymore; the military grew accustomed to telling someone "I want X" and it happened, regardless of cost, lifecycle sustainment, security, etc. NMCI forced the DoN to develop and articulate requirements properly, write good contracts, budget for software and hardware sustainment, and generally operate professionally.
In short, I would take an NMCI computer and enterprise services from 2010 versus a Marine Corps Enterprise Network computer and enterprise services from 2022 any day of the week.
Disclosure: I have been a Marine Corps Communications Officer for almost 20 years; starting before NMCI. I worked at the regional and enterprise levels to transition ownership back from the NMCI program/contractor to government owned.
[+] [-] sure_about_that|3 years ago|reply
Everyone who asked before we started that “war” was called a traitor.
[+] [-] tbihl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thelittleone|3 years ago|reply
Despite this grim perspective, I have hope for the future of humanity.
[+] [-] throwaway892238|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] User23|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daniel-cussen|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rhacker|3 years ago|reply
I think I would normally disagree with a govt. agency using a cloud platform, but it might actually be MORE secure than what they can do themselves.
[+] [-] dekhn|3 years ago|reply
Heather Adkins who leads security (and is one of those ultra-longtimers) brought a number of senior eng for internal, ultra-private meetings where they showed the eng leadership exactly what had happened. I wasn't invited but at that time, sat near the exit door and their faces were just ... aghast at the consequences of what had just happened as a function of the systems they built.
The snowden dumps also showed that the NSA had packet traces of BigTable RPCs which was quite an eye-opener and definitely sped up privacy projects.
[+] [-] barkingcat|3 years ago|reply
A lot of people have selective memory when it comes to security issues.
And those breaches are multimillion record breaches.
The China one was bad enough for google to terminate the entire link to china and pull out entirely.
[+] [-] Hextinium|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.blackhatethicalhacking.com/articles/hacking-stor...
Ninja edit: seems like dekhn just confirmed what I said above
[+] [-] jefftk|3 years ago|reply
Have Amazon or Apple had a major breach?
(I do think Google takes security atypically seriously, though)
[+] [-] IncRnd|3 years ago|reply
> nothing like those million record breaches that EVERYONE is afflicted by.
Why do you think that? Google has had several major breaches.
There was a google+ bug that exposed info on 52.5 million users, one on 500,000 users' data, and other disclosures. There have also been corrupted apps on the play store, like Brain Test that infected at least a million devices with difficult to remove malware. A decade ago there were about 5 million Google passwords leaked online.
That's just what I can recall atm.
[+] [-] hedora|3 years ago|reply
They continue to fail badly on all three of those fronts from an end user perspective. However, most of their problems on that front are self-inflicted / intentional cost saving / revenue generating.
Edit. Examples:
Sent box message injection in gmail getting (edit: people) fired. People sneak a forged sexual harassment message (or whatever) to the victim past the gmail spam filter, put the victim's address in the from header, and then corporate IT checks the account, sees the "outgoing" message in the victim account and fires the victim.
Google drive data loss (many examples in web search results).
Permanent account lockouts through no fault of the end user.
Their entire targeted ad business.
Malicious you tube take downs.
...and dozens of other examples
[+] [-] reassembled|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walrus01|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kart23|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chucky123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pengaru|3 years ago|reply
Hate to burst your bubble..
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/chine...
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] api|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] User23|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...
[+] [-] throwaway892238|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewguenther|3 years ago|reply
Before anyone tells me that Workspace is FedRAMP compliant: Yes, I know, but they do not expose the controls necessary for non-government users to be compliant.
[+] [-] devoutsalsa|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bcardarella|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] easton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootsudo|3 years ago|reply
I can see how licensing for Office is "expensive" but this is the DoD so that should be the least concerning issue.
Training is touched in the PR, but, it is not 1:1, especially for excel spreadsheets with macros, pivot tables or integration to PowerBi, which again is Office 365. I doubt FPA/Accounting and such are going to move over to Google.
For tech, same ,I don't see it happening. I could see an excuse as "more secure" as the identity is entirely cloud based, and you don't need to label/track content via Azure AIP/DRM'ish and it's easily accessibly within google, but that is entirely possible on O365 after it's tuned for that. I also am curious about general mail routing and such, no more exchange? No more outlook? (Well, I guess you could use outlook via imap, but then again what's the point?)
This PR just has me asking more questions, especially since all of the options AFAIK for gsuite require an active internet connection and a modern/newer browser. The same org that uses Panasonic Toughbooks, is going to have a have to use an "offline" mode of gsuite.
[+] [-] low_tech_punk|3 years ago|reply
Ref: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/11/18/german-s...
[+] [-] master_crab|3 years ago|reply
Maybe now MSFT won’t charge DoD as much for 365 again.
Sounds like a typical day in the cloud wars. Let’s see what happens when renegotiations come up for the contract.
[+] [-] redler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elnr|3 years ago|reply
I look forward for the day when we come full circle and they re-name it Google Apps for Business, Government, Education, and Grandma Bertha.
[+] [-] EricE|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helf|3 years ago|reply
I work in a company that has forced Workspaces upon us and it randomly is a nightmare. Tons of functionality you get in Excel is not there. It is a complete nightmare adjusting access to random files. You often end up with files and folders "owned" by a user who no longer exists and then we have to get the central IT to go fix it.
Ugh. Everything being browser based with crap desktop clients is the worst. They also want to constantly share crap via Google Drive and, unless I have missed something major, you can't run Google Drive, in Windows at least, under multiple signed in users with the same drive letter. You'll just get access denied errors. THAT makes shortcuts and all a complete fucking nightmare.
I have to often shrug when my users have issues and send in a report to the Japanese head office and hope they respond timely. I know /that/ isn't a workspaces fault, but it just compounds things.
[+] [-] plaidfuji|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arthurcolle|3 years ago|reply
I was actually OK with moving from Excel to Google Sheets since the coverage of functions seemed mostly ok, minus all the new cool shit they added in one of the more recent releases (XLOOKUP, etc) but I literally tried a trivial INDEX/MATCH with a simple 5x20 matrix of price values and literally could not get it to work even though the identical "code" worked in Excel.
Really, really frustrating. I was working at a hedge fund at the time and I was simultaneously working on a real time portfolio dashboard as a web app, and needed to also have a stopgap solution in the form of a spreadsheet for people to play with and debugging differences in Google's spreadsheet function implementations and Excel's was infuriating
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