FINALLY a news outlet is starting to catch on to that
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
118 points (100.0% liked)
Canada
10456 readers
1893 users here now
What's going on Canada?
Related Communities
🍁 Meta
🗺️ Provinces / Territories
- Alberta
- British Columbia
- Manitoba
- New Brunswick
- Newfoundland and Labrador
- Northwest Territories
- Nova Scotia
- Nunavut
- Ontario
- Prince Edward Island
- Quebec
- Saskatchewan
- Yukon
🏙️ Cities / Local Communities
- Anmore (BC)
- Burnaby (BC)
- Calgary (AB)
- Comox Valley (BC)
- Edmonton (AB)
- Greater Sudbury (ON)
- Guelph (ON)
- Halifax (NS)
- Hamilton (ON)
- Kingston (ON)
- Kootenays (BC)
- London (ON)
- Mississauga (ON)
- Montreal (QC)
- Nanaimo (BC)
- Niagara Falls (ON)
- Niagara-on-the-Lake (ON)
- Oceanside (BC)
- Ottawa (ON)
- Port Alberni (BC)
- Regina (SK)
- Saskatoon (SK)
- Squamish (BC)
- Thunder Bay (ON)
- Toronto (ON)
- Vancouver (BC)
- Vancouver Island (BC)
- Victoria (BC)
- Waterloo (ON)
- Whistler (BC)
- Windsor (ON)
- Winnipeg (MB)
Sorted alphabetically by city name.
🏒 Sports
Hockey
- Main: c/Hockey
- Calgary Flames
- Edmonton Oilers
- Montréal Canadiens
- Ottawa Senators
- Toronto Maple Leafs
- Vancouver Canucks
- Winnipeg Jets
Football (NFL): incomplete
Football (CFL): incomplete
Baseball
Basketball
Soccer
- Main: /c/CanadaSoccer
- Toronto FC
💻 Schools / Universities
- BC | UBC (U of British Columbia)
- BC | SFU (Simon Fraser U)
- BC | VIU (Vancouver Island U)
- BC | TWU (Trinity Western U)
- ON | UofT (U of Toronto)
- ON | UWO (U of Western Ontario)
- ON | UWaterloo (U of Waterloo)
- ON | UofG (U of Guelph)
- ON | OTU (Ontario Tech U)
- QC | McGill (McGill U)
Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.
💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales
- Personal Finance Canada
- Buy Canadian
- BAPCSalesCanada
- Canadian Investor
- Canadian Skincare
- Churning Canada
- Quebec Finance
🗣️ Politics
- General:
- Federal Parties (alphabetical):
- By Province (alphabetical):
🍁 Social / Culture
- Ask a Canadian
- Bières Québec
- Canada Francais
- Canadian Gaming
- EhVideos (Canadian video media)
- First Nations
- First Nations Languages
- Indigenous
- Inuit
- Logiciels libres au Québec
- Maple Music (music)
Rules
- Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
118
National Defence uses US cloud services for 'mission critical' applications
(www.nationalobserver.com)
The title is a bit deceptive, they're American companies, but the datacenters are in Canada.
Microsoft has like half a dozen spread out across the country.
Of course this is the case though, there's literally no other country that doesn't use them unless they're literally banned. Even China has Microsoft datacenters, and I pretty much guarantee they're used for government and military purposes.
It's not at all deceptive given that Microsoft is on record explicitly saying that they would respect US law over Canadian law.
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.
The keyword here is mission critical. That shit should work in case the American companies flip the account off for some reason.
There's plenty of shit that would stop working if the American government decided to disable us that are far more critical.
The US/Canadian militaries are very closely intertwined. NORAD and Five Eyes both come to mind. We also have hundreds of military members stationed on US bases, and they have people stationed on some of our our bases as well.
Besides, if the US chose to attack Canada, there's not a godamn thing our miliary could do to stop them. Fully operational or not we simply are no match for the American military, nor could we ever be. We have 1/10th of the population.
So why waste money on preparing for something that would 100% result in us losing anyways?
It is nevertheless better to steer away from those dependencies instead of being complacent.
I disagree, there's always a balancing act between being dependant and what you have to give up in order to do it yourself. In this case, I think being dependant is the better choice.
The thing is, this is just the tip of the tech iceberg. We're also dependant upon the US for high-end computer parts, they can ban the sale of chips from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to Canada if they wanted. And in turn, the US and Canada are both dependant on Taiwan and other countries for the actual chip production from those companies.
Does that mean Canada should also invest in developing our own microprocessor design and manufacturing? Currently, the only two countries even trying that are the US and China, and China is still a ways behind. Those are the two largest countries by GDP in the entire world, Canada's GDP is tiny in comparison. Anything we invest in isn't simply going to be inferior, it's going to be pathetic in comparison and leave us at a significant disadvantage in terms of operational capabilities.
We have to recognize the reality of the situation, and that is that being dependant here is the only realistic path forward given our size.
It should for sure strive to find additional partners to reduce as much as possible those dependencies as well. Also the immediateness of distribution interruptions in sourcing CPU isn’t comparable to cutting critical services in the cloud. The later being instantaneous while the former has a long time to impact.
You apply balance within the framework that allows you to be more resilient. Not in absolute.
We are talking about a country, not your local SMB.
i appreciate you being more rational and less jingoistic about this than most canadians i meet rn. don’t get me wrong, i understand their reaction given the circumstances, it’s just detached from reality for the reasons you layed out here.
i don’t think the world understands as well as americans who were raised here exactly how much the american military dwarfs every other similar institution on the planet in every respect that matters.
like, it is quite literally the largest and most powerful military in human history and it’s not even fucking close. the US could declare open fucking war on the entire rest of the world and stand a reasonable chance.
that’s why the neofascist taking control here matters to everyone. they’re gonna try and conquer the fucking world. think that sounds absurd? so did everyone in the West when hitler said the same thing, and he got dangerously close.
Canada would be the France of that variation of World War 3. We would surrender almost instantly.
Most government agencies in Canada use Microsoft or Google suite. Probably most companies in Canada as well. So it all adds up to revenue for big US tech.
That said a review is going on, and maybe the fact that potential alternatives exist will be mentioned for the first time.