I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but this is some amazing blame shifting. The root cause of the problem is the government single-sourcing a vendor and being incapable of negotiating with said vendor. The US government is 10% of Microsoft's annual revenue just on security services (if I read the article correctly) but is failing to negotiate. The right answer here is if the situation is that bad, make a very public long-term commitment to shift to something else & up-level your IT department to be able to execute multi-year projects competently. Instead of meeting Microsoft on the business playing field, it's trying to use scary "national security threat" verbiage to try to bully them in the court of public opinion.
Regarding security, at the end of the day, the US government is a huge target for adversaries. You can't outsource your security practices & if MS software is really that much worse they should be fixing their purchasing requirements. The reality though is that whatever software the US government would switch to would become the focus of adversarial research.
Regarding security, at the end of the day, the US government is a huge target for adversaries. You can't outsource your security practices & if MS software is really that much worse they should be fixing their purchasing requirements. The reality though is that whatever software the US government would switch to would become the focus of adversarial research.