Stay classy HP. We need to publicly shame these companies like HP, Halliburton, Blackwater (XE) that take advantage of the government and tax-payers.
HP Holds Navy Network ‘Hostage’ for $3.3 Billion
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Re: HP Holds Navy Network ‘Hostage’ for $3.3 Billion
#12Considering the scale, considering the requirements, considering the difficulties related to the global nature of the network and considering the utter incompetence of any government official that ever had anything to do with IT.
That's a bargain.
Imagine if Google had to provide whole infrastructure plus support - with their legendary customer support. They wouldn't last a day.
When Government tries to do it itself- It will cost 20 Billion.
Re: HP Holds Navy Network ‘Hostage’ for $3.3 Billion
#13Can someone who knows more than I do about this explain exactly why the government uses 'no-bid' and 'cost-plus' contracts and why nobody seems to complain about the seemingly obvious (to me, at least) conflict of interest here?
It wasn't clear from the article but it may have been that the original 5 year deal required a bid and then each subsequent deal had to be no-bid for the various reasons stated in the article.
Re: HP Holds Navy Network ‘Hostage’ for $3.3 Billion
#14Navy holds gun to own head, demands immediate release. News at 11.
Re: HP Holds Navy Network ‘Hostage’ for $3.3 Billion
#15While I do think it's a bad idea for the military to outsource computer networks this article uses terrible evidence to back up it's critique and complaints. * "Worse, HP — which acquired Electronic Data Systems and its Navy contract in 2008 — still operates under performance metrics set a decade ago. A typical workstation on the network costs the Navy $2,490.72 per year." A secure workstation with full outsourced su…
Just to speak to the one point of security measures, government computers do perform data at rest encryption and network access control. Threat heuristics are done off-the-shelf with something like McAfee/Norton on the workstation end, and with commodity IDS software running at the edge, which I think sounds about right.
For most government machines, they're required to be connected via VPN, and all traffic funneled through the respective agencies in order to be on the internet at all, so at least the cloud data they do access has the opportunity to be logged, scrubbed and sanitized by the agency in question.
I can't speak specifically for Navy, but with most agencies I've dealt with (including DOD,) this is how things are.
So, long story short, if they aren't required to perform any security measures like the above-mentioned, then they should really get kudos for going above and beyond. That said, at least where I am, those are requirements, so I'm guessing the reporter either misspoke or was uninformed.
Re: HP Holds Navy Network ‘Hostage’ for $3.3 Billion
#16That is why government agencies should always insist on open source everything. It may seem expensive in the beginning, but it will end up cheaper in the end because you will always have a choice for alternative contractors if you are unhappy with one.
Re: HP Holds Navy Network ‘Hostage’ for $3.3 Billion
#17That is why government agencies should always insist on open source everything. It may seem expensive in the beginning, but it will end up cheaper in the end because you will always have a choice for alternative contractors if you are unhappy with one.
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Re: HP Holds Navy Network ‘Hostage’ for $3.3 Billion
#18NMCI is the worst thing to happen to the Navy (in my opinion). When I was in the Navy, we managed our own servers and infrastructure on a 1000-workstation aircraft carrier network, including HP-UX/Sybase servers, multiple domain controllers, Exchange servers, rotating tape backups, and Alcatel backbone switches.
We only called contractors when we couldn't figure out a problem (which was pretty rare with the team we had). We set up our own network security monitoring and router ACLs, even though we were not authorized to do so, since we were going into a combat zone (Operation Enduring Freedom) and damn the procedures when your ship is at stake. We had it running so tight that when our battlegroup did penetration testing before deployment, they accused us of cheating because they couldn't get in (even though they had a hole poked in the NOC firewall for them and we weren't supposed to have an incoming ACL on our side).
NMCI rolled out a few months after I got out of the Navy, and ever since then all I've seen coming out of there since then is hugely incompetent ITs who don't even know what the OSI model is, let alone how to put together a disaster recovery plan or manage network security. All they know how to do is put in a trouble ticket when someone can't send an attachment or they see "NTLDR is missing".
I joined the Navy to get the kind of experience that I did, and I feel terrible for the thousands of ITs in there now who have their hands tied for anything harder than resetting someone's password.
Re: HP Holds Navy Network ‘Hostage’ for $3.3 Billion
#19That is why government agencies should always insist on open source everything. It may seem expensive in the beginning, but it will end up cheaper in the end because you will always have a choice for alternative contractors if you are unhappy with one.
And we (the citizens) are paying for it, shouldn't we be able to extract as much value from it as we can? (Or better yet, be able to volunteer time to make it better?)
Re: HP Holds Navy Network ‘Hostage’ for $3.3 Billion
#20Huh? EDS still holds this contract? I remember EDS lost a large ($1bn+) contract 8 or 9 years ago when it botched up a PC refresh so badly that by the time they started installing new desktops, they were 6-7 years old. I don't fully blame EDS, having interned there a long time ago, they're just a huge inefficient corporation hired by a larger, more inefficient government.
Ross Perot was was the Honor Board Chairman at the Naval Academy when he graduated in 1954. EDS has been providing data admin services to the Navy since he founded the company. Those ventures are what made him the billions to fund his presidential campaign. EDS is lashed to the Navy with steel wires.
Ross had already left EDS before I started there, and I started there a lifetime ago, though I've met both Ross Sr. & Jr. through my father's work at Perot Systems (now part of Dell). When I was a 14 year old kid interning there, I didn't quite understand why people paid EDS $500/hour to do IT work. Now that I'm a 31 year old entrepreneur, I now understand why people pay EDS $500/hour to do IT work. In the truest sense of the term, it's ignorance.