The potential cloud deal between Pentagon and Amazon Web Services that’s been reported about in recent weeks raises significant vendor lock concerns and will be a decision the United States Department of Defense will regret, according to Brian Johnson, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of cloud management platform DivvyCloud. In a statement provided to AndroidHeadlines, Mr. Johnson reiterated some of his previously disclosed arguments against single-cloud strategies such as the one Pentagon is now said to be considering, having suggested that a lack of foresight when it comes to redundancy plans is something that no one in the IT industry can afford to do and a decision that will “haunt the [sic] Pentagon” if it materializes.
“Always build redundancy into your plan,” the industry veteran said while referring to the lessons the industry has learned over the last several decades. As no single technology is perfect, a multi-cloud strategy allows for much more effective precautionary measures than relying on a single provider does, Mr. Johnson said. Even beyond the general workings of any given hosting platform, a cloud infrastructure can always fail due to a human error, one that’s less likely to have dire consequences if you have a third-party contingency plan in place, the industry veteran said, having pointed to Amazon’s S3 service disruption on the East Coast from February as one of the most recent examples of such issues. The incident in question led to a major cloud outage caused by one employee typing the wrong command, which is something that neither private businesses nor the U.S. government can be immune to by relying on just a single cloud provider, according to DivvyCloud’s CEO. “To think that Pentagon’s entire cloud deployment could have been affected by this [AWS outage] seems like a scary prospect,” Mr. Johnson concluded.
While cloud management companies like DivvyCloud are unsurprisingly not supportive of any single-cloud use case, Pentagon’s alleged deal with Amazon may also encounter other issues, with President Trump reportedly being interested in cracking down on some of the e-commerce giant’s businesses going forward even though no concrete plan on the matter is currently said to exist. Amazon’s reported deal with Pentagon could be worth in the ballpark of $10 billion, Business Insider reported in early April.