SITA partners with Microsoft Azure

Jamie McKane

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SITA partners with Microsoft Azure

The State Information Technology Agency (SITA) and Microsoft South Africa have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) which will allow government departments to move their services to Microsoft's Azure cloud platform.

The MOU, which was announced at the Govtech conference in Durban today, also sees government endorse Microsoft as a key partner to enable its digital transformation.
 
How are they ensuring personal data is not being moved cross border?
 
Queue Cue an astronomical number of failed cloud migration and cloud application developments, all healthily funded and siphoned accordingly.
 
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The confidentiality aspect of data hosted by cloud providers is getting better with customers now able to generate and host the keys needed to encrypt it (Preferably hosted on private HSMs). So if the US government subpoenas Microsoft for the info, it will not be able to comply… sound good so far. However, availability is another ball game, let's suppose the SA Government allies with Russia as a strategic military partner (which seems a possibility now), and the USA declares war on Russia (sound unlikely, but relations are getting worse). If Microsoft is ordered to pull the plug and destroy our data we are totally... (can't find the appropriate word now). What government agency is going to risk this situation? I'd like to hear what SSA has to say about this, I somehow doubt they would support the MOU. The better option is for SITA to build their own private cloud services for government. You see when it comes to data sovereignty, you must draw a line around where your data is and make sure you own the physical infrastructure within that line. As simple as that.
 
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