Amazon.com Inc. is delaying Microsoft's cloud-based Office suite (Microsoft 365) for a year as both companies work to resolve Office security issues.
The two companies signed an agreement last year to provide Amazon employees with Microsoft 365, the packet cloud-based that includes Word, Outlook, Windows and other software. Amazon has long used versions of Office installed on its own servers.
However, Amazon ended the partnership when Microsoft discovered that a hacker group from Russia had gained access to the email accounts of some of its employees.
Αφού διεξήγαγε τη δική της analysis του λογισμικού, η Amazon ζήτησε αλλαγές για να προφυλαχθεί από κάθε μη εξουσιοδοτημένη πρόσβαση και να δημιουργήσει μια πιο λεπτομερή καταγραφή της δραστηριότητας των χρηστών στις εφαρμογές, ορισμένες από τις οποίες η Microsoft διαθέτει στο Office 365.
It's a massive commercial deal between two Seattle-area cloud computing rivals, an engineering collaboration that could improve the security of the world's most widely used Office productivity software.
“We took a deep dive into Office 365 and all the controls around it,” said CJ Moses, Amazon's head of information security. Moses' team gave Microsoft security chief Charlie Bell — a former Amazon engineering executive — a list of requested improvements, and engineers from both companies have spent months working on those changes.
"We believe we are in a good place to start the next yearlayout next year," Moses said in an interview last week at Amazon Web Services' re:Invent conference.
Amazon committed $1 billion over five years to buy Microsoft's 365 software for its roughly 1,5 million employees, Business Insider reported last year. The deal made Amazon the second largest private employer in the US behind the Walmart Inc., one of the biggest buyers of Microsoft's cloud productivity suite.
Then, last fall, a hacking group called Midnight Blizzard attacked some of Microsoft's corporate systems. The company revealed in January that the hackers they eventually gained access to a “small number” of email accounts of senior executives, cybersecurity workers, legal professionals and ordinary employees. It was one of the mistakes that prompted CEO Satya Nadella to declare security Microsoft's top priority.
Moses earlier this year recommended to Amazon's security chief Steve Schmidt and CEO Andy Jassy that the company suspend its use of Microsoft 365 to give Microsoft time to assess the damage and Amazon to conduct further research.
