The government has had their own servers and messaging applications since the internet began. There’s no good reason to ditch what they had in favkr of an inferior product like Microsoft or Google’s web mail.
What we used when I was there 20 years ago was vastly more secure because we rolled our own encryption (literally used mylar punch tape to load it into a device and diatribute it to the network.)
It was resistant to jamming and interception because it worked on a rolling set of keys that changed hundreds of times per second. (frequency hopping)
We owned the .gov and .mil domains and administered them ourselves.
Moving to an external corporation is less secure, and costs more money for the tax payers.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’m pretty sure every federal executive agency has been on Active Directory and Exchange for like 20+ years now. The courts migrated off of IBM Domino/Notes about 6 or 7 years ago, onto MS Exchange/Outlook.
Uh that’s now understood not to be best practice, because it tends to be quite insecure.
Either way, Microsoft’s ecosystem on enterprise is pretty much the default on all large organizations, and they have (for better or for worse) convinced almost everyone that the total cost of ownership is cheaper for MS-administered cloud stuff than for any kind of non-MS system for identity/user management, email, calendar, video chat, and instant messaging. Throwing in Word/Excel/PowerPoint is just icing on the cake.