[qzw]

I abhor the general trend of governments outsourcing everything to private companies, but in this case, a technologically advanced country’s central government couldn’t even muster up the most basic of IT practices, and as you said, accountability will likely not rest with the people actually responsible for this debacle. Even a nefarious cloud services CEO couldn’t dream up a better sales case for the wholesale outsourcing of such infrastructure in the future.

[xp84]

I'm with you. It's really sad that this provides such a textbook case of why not to own your own infrastructure.

Practically speaking, I think a lot of what is offered by Microsoft, Google, and the other big companies that are selling into this space is vastly overpriced and way too full of lock-in, taking this stuff in-house without sufficient knowhow and maturity is even more foolish.

It's like not hiring professional truck drivers, but instead of at least people who can basically drive a truck, hiring someone who doesn't even know how to drive a car.

[mensetmanusman]

If this is true, every government should subsidize competitors in their own country to drive down costs.

[TheNewsIsHere]

Aside from data sovereignty concerns, I think the best rebuttal to that would be to point out that every major provider contractually disclaims liability for maintaining backups.

Now, sure, there is AWS Backup and Microsoft 365 Backup. Nevertheless, those are backups in the same logical environment.

If you’re a central government, you still need to be maintaining an independent and basically functional backup that you control.

I own a small business of three people and we still run Veeam for 365 and keep backups in multiple clouds, multiple regions, and on disparate hardware.

[dv_dt]

One co-effects of the outsourcing strategy is to underfund internal tech teams.. which then makes them less effective in both competing against and managing outsourced capabilities.