Amazon Paused Rollout of Microsoft Office for a Year After Hacks

Amazon has postponed implementing Microsoft's cloud-based Office suite for its workforce by one year, citing security concerns following a Russian cyber attack on Microsoft's systems. The delay affects a $1 billion, five-year contract signed last year to provide Microsoft 365 to Amazon's 1.5 million employees, making the e-commerce giant one of the largest customers of Microsoft's cloud productivity suite.

The decision came after Microsoft revealed that Midnight Blizzard, a Russia-linked hacking group, had breached several employee email accounts, including those of senior executives and cybersecurity staff. Amazon subsequently conducted its own security review and requested enhanced protection measures from Microsoft.

cloud failure has big consequences

[david.emery]

When your cloud service is broken/penetrated, what are you going to do? It's kinda like "FaaS" - Failure as a Service.

Cloud systems

[Baron_Yam]

It must be nice for malicious actors to have a nice, big, homogeneous target to crack.

Any business that can afford any kind of IT support (this includes having an agreement for part-time service with a local IT support provider) and doesn't have a lot of WfH should have its own on-prem systems. A host box with a UPS doesn't cost a lot, and you're going to be forking out for business DSL anyway.

Why everyone is in such a rush to line MIcrosoft's pockets by agreeing to go to their cloud and pay subscription fees... well, I understand but I think the explanation is lazy and stupid.

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[Baron_Yam]

...and of course the same goes for Amazon, etc. If you're going cloud when there's no requirement for it, you're just moving your risks around and maybe even adding to them, while paying a premium for the privilege.

Re:Cloud systems

[Murdoch5]

Oh, they know they're adding risk, for virtually no benefit. What can't LibreOffice on the desktop do that Office 365 in the cloud can? If you need help with Office 365, good luck, try sorting out the absolute shit show that is the licensing, not even Microsoft can understand how the licensing works. Seriously, we had multiple employees get licensing errors, and some solutions were just insane:

1. Reinstall Windows.
2. Uninstall Office, Install Office.
3. Buy new Office 365 Licenses (yes, seriously we already pay FAR too much / month).
4. Change the user account location in Entra from Canada to the US, then to Canada.

Basically, Office 365 is broken. I wouldn't even bother with it, but it's in a bleeping contract that we have to use MS Office, and I happened not to be there when that clause was accepted. That was added as a clause when one VPs computer locked up, after trying to open a XLSX file saved from LibreOffice. The real issue with the file? Bad encoding on the original made in Office 365 Excel.

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[eneville]

The real cause I bet is proprietary blobs in the file.

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[Murdoch5]

I think, from memory, it was caused by some bad cells that got formatted to a date instead of a number, and then a chart trying to render using that data. LibreOffice didn't care, but Excel, oh boy, and it was clearly meant for those values to be numbers. If you looked down the column, they were almost all numbers, except for 3 cells (I think), and Excel had auto-converted them.

I had to add some data to that number column, which is why I had it open in LibreOffice, and that's why the VP thought LibeOff

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[eneville]

Tracks with my experience of Excel, it used to do odd things with ISO8601 style dates and converted them to MM/DD/YY when saving. Very irritating when it had no business doing that - and I can't remember if it was region dependant (DD/MM/YY perhaps in some regions?).

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[Murdoch5]

Absolutely, that auto save BS is one of the reasons why I won't use Office 365. Another of my most hated features, the f'ing idiotic changes view (I don't know the proper name), where you have comment boxes everything with arrows, but then the comment boxes get corrupted. Oh, and should we talk about the latency of the key input! Honestly, I've used computers from the early 80s that had more responsive input system, holy crap, and it's not a freak rarity, it's 20%+ of the time you can wait SECONDS for th

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[bussdriver]

Why do you need to use exchange again?

Why no Microsoft 365 on stack?

[Pinky's Brain]

It seems to me there would be customers willing to pay extra for Microsoft 365 served from Azure Stack, so they can have their own security and control their own data.