Problem
The Pentagon (or U.S. Federal Government) recently awarded a colossal cloud computing contract that might eventually be worth up to $9 billion dollars to 4 companies: Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and Amazon. The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, as it is called, is planned to be used across all branches of service, for all levels of classified information, and all security domains. This contract was awarded after a similar contract was awarded to Microsoft, but was cancelled due to allegations of presidential meddling in the award process. The political issues have nothing to do with our analyses, so steer clear of those. The new contract was awarded in Dec 2022.
Now, here we are less than 3 months later... The U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) recently leaked 3 TBs of sensitive internal emails via a misconfigured Microsoft Azure cloud server. The misconfiguration allowed anyone to access this extensive trove of emails with no uesr ID or password required. Not a hack - since no malicious actor was involved, but a very unfortunate configuration error. In military parlance, it was a "friendly fire" attack.
Given that these types of issues occur far too frequently in both the government and corporate sectors:
A. Describe at least 3 policies ANY organization should use to ensure data in the cloud remains private and secure.
B. Explain the purpose of each policy you describe.
C. Support your arguments with at least 3 external sources total with at least 1 external source for every policy recommendation you make.
D. Describe each policy recommendation in a separate paragraph
E. Finally, as a citizen, do you believe we should be using/storing data with national security implications in the cloud?
a. No external references required for this part, but explain your logic
b. A couple of sentences is sufficient.