On Tue, 31 Aug 2010, Gilbert Wilson wrote: > I'm curious to know what LOPSAers think of the Danger Room article > about the Navy's relationship with HP. While I don't think it's a > great idea for the military to outsource it's network operations > (certainly not to the degree that the Navy has) the article's evidence > is piss-poor. The costs that they quote for average workstations, > security incident response, and services for spam filtering appear > completely reason to me for a network the size and complexity of the > Navy's (the second biggest in the world.... right behind the INTERNET!).
I think the article has a great deal of bias and hyperbole in it -- anything that starts with "held hostage" as the title is hardly going to focus on any part of the contracted agreement that's actually working (apparently 89%-or-so of the users are content... but as always (and this list is no exception to the rule), there are far more people complaining than complimenting). The costs quoted -- like the 'cost' of a hammer or a toilet seat in the military almost certainly include the involvement of people and processes to get things done, not just the base cost of the item. Beyond that, "nearly 400,000 computers in 620 locations throughout the United States, Japan and Cuba" seems pretty damn'd small for the "second largest network in the world" -- seems to me that there's some qualifiers missing there. I'd be far more interested in seeing reporting that's more interested in balanced examination of facts, than eliciting knee-jerk reactions. Further, while I'm not particularly a fan of outsourcing, that's exactly what folk are doing with cloud services like Gmail, iTunes, iMac, yada, yada -- with the crucial difference that you're just SOL if they decide to give up and go away. TNSTASFL after all. cheers! ========================================================================== "A cat spends her life conflicted between a deep, passionate and profound desire for fish and an equally deep, passionate and profound desire to avoid getting wet. This is the defining metaphor of my life right now." _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
