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outworldertoday at 3:34 AM2 repliesview on HN

> Microsoft is the go to solution for every government agency, FEDRAMP / CMMC environments, etc.

I've been involved with FEDRAMP initiatives in the past. That doesn't mean as much as you'd think. Some really atrocious systems have been FEDRAMP certified. Maybe when you go all the way to FEDRAMP High there could be some better guardrails; I doubt it.

Microsoft has just been entrenched in the government, that's all. They have the necessary contacts and consultants to make it happen.

> Thinking that the solution is a full reset is not necessarily wrong but it's a bit of a red flag.

The author does mention rewriting subsystem by subsystem while keeping the functionality intact, adding a proper messaging layer, until the remaining systems are just a shell of what they once were. That sounds reasonable.


Replies

axelriettoday at 3:58 AM

Thanks. That was exactly the plan. Full rewrites are extremely risky (see the 2nd System syndrome) as people wrongly assume they will redo everything and also add everything everyone always wanted, and fix all dept, and do it in a fraction of the time, which is delusional and almost always fail. Stepwise modernization is a proven technique.

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staticassertiontoday at 9:38 AM

> I've been involved with FEDRAMP initiatives in the past. That doesn't mean as much as you'd think. Some really atrocious systems have been FEDRAMP certified. Maybe when you go all the way to FEDRAMP High there could be some better guardrails; I doubt it.

I never said otherwise. I said that Microsoft services are the defacto tools for FEDRAMP. I never implied that those environments are some super high standard of safety. But obviously if the tools used for every government environment are fundamentally unsafe, that's a massive national security problem.

> Microsoft has just been entrenched in the government, that's all.

Yes, this is what I was saying.

> The author does mention rewriting subsystem by subsystem while keeping the functionality intact, adding a proper messaging layer, until the remaining systems are just a shell of what they once were. That sounds reasonable.

It sounds reasonable, it's just hard to say without more insight. We're getting one side of things.