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National Defence uses US cloud services for 'mission critical' applications
(www.nationalobserver.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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What does that change? It's still property of Microsoft, and they've stated quite recently that US law will override any notion of sovereignty or ownership. So the datacenters could be anywhere, the data is, for all intents and purposes, american.
And? It doesn't change the fact that there's literally no way to be competitive with their services. Even Google can't compete, and they've been trying for 15 years and spending billions of dollars.
What's Canada going to do? Spend $100 billion of our tax dollars trying to compete so that we don't have to use US software?
Spend a fraction of that as Canada's military IT does not need to serve the whole damn industry.
And I'm pretty sure a bunch of other countries manage without MS for critical services.
Countries? Name one.
I know a few places in Europe tried to avoid it, but that was at the state or city level, and most of them are back on windows again.
People keep trying it, but it's incredibly hard to retrain literally tens to hundreds of thousands of people on everything from their operating system, to their word processor, to their enterprise commutation and server infrastructure.
The Microsoft stack is enormous. Google is the only other company even close to doing a cohesive structure, and it's not great.
Picking 40 less than integrated replacement open source products is never going to work.
I say this as someone who uses open source stuff myself. The average user is dumb as shit, and has no interest in relearning how to use a computer.
The topic is not "some cities out there use MS cloud." It's Canada uses MS cloud to prepare critical military operations".
So your claim is absolutely all countries in the world use MS cloud services to prepare their critical military operations. Do you still stand by it?
All countries? Definitely not.
There are like 20 countries that don't even have a military, so that's impossible.
Would most countries with a military use Microsoft cloud services in some significant capacity? I would bet they do.
As said by another, no need to offer the service worldwide, no need to be competitive, just need not to give them our data. It will cost a lot yes, but I'd much rather that than giving freely all our data to a fascist government and a kowtowing corporation.
Also nice moving of the goalposts, you first said that the article's title was deceptive, "because the datacenters are in Canada". I maintain my claim that this changes absolutely nothing to the story.