> A programming flaw in its cloud services also allowed China-backed hackers to steal email from federal officials. On Friday, Microsoft said it would stop using China-based engineers to support Defense Department cloud-computing programs after a report by investigative outlet ProPublica revealed the practice, prompting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to order a review of Pentagon cloud deals.
Maybe instead of fines, large companies should be forbidden to do any new contracts for some months. That would be a larger incentive and also comprehensible to sales people.
In which magical country do you suspect this would be enforced ?
Microsoft also has a captive market here. Realistically you aren't going to migrate millions of employees and servers to another tech stack, even over something egregiously bad.
Something like storing cleared data really should be handled 100% internally with an open source stack that's regularly audited.
But that sounds really difficult, even if it would be cheaper or the same price in the long run.
I didn't suggested preventing the fulfillment of existing contracts. Nobody would change for all costumers. They just wouldn't get any new contractors.
If you happen to be unlucky and Microsoft just got convicted, you either need to wait some months or go to a competitor. The state shouldn't care about that, when your mechanic just went to prison, what you're gonna do?
But yeah I don't know any party who has such ideas.
The US doesn't either. Someone didn't comply with existing law here. I've been on a program where uncleared people from another business unit were used as internal labor loan for export controlled work. One of them was belatedly discovered to be a Canadian citizen and they were retasked the next day. There are strict rules in this domain. It's just that nobody gives a fuck about paying for an IT cost center to do things securely. Chalk up another win for outsourcing and moving to the cloud for cost savings.
