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Comment by phillipcarter | Hacker News Reader

MS employee here:

Long before the acquisition, we've been hosting important stuff in private GitHub repositories. Including having strategic discussions in those private repositories.

We've also done a lot of that stuff in public too. Some might say a bit too much, given that we've had things leaked and/or misinterpreted w.r.t product direction in the past.

I still agree with your point, but I believe more of this sort of thing is happening. Lots of stuff that has no real reason to be private is just being open source by default.

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> Long before the acquisition, we've been hosting important stuff in private GitHub repositories. Including having strategic discussions in those private repositories.

Wow! I am very surprised by that. Is that an officially allowed policy? Or is it something that is "don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness"?

Yes, it's absolutely an allowed policy. When we made .NET (Core) open source, we meant it. We still use email like any other org, but whenever we're working on our product we try to keep discussions on GitHub. It's also made collaboration with other teams far, far easier.

How so? What was going to be controlled, by whom?

I assumed that Microsoft has security policies to ensure that all confidential information (e.g. non-open-source code and strategic discussions) is stored on infrastructure controlled by Microsoft.

The company I work at is very careful about keeping our intellectual property on our infrastructure, and I am surprised that a larger company like Microsoft doesn't have similar policies.

Microsoft aims to make most of its money in the immediate future by convincing every major business in the world to let MS host that company's email, internal documents, spreadsheets and powerpoints on Microsoft's office365 servers.

It would be highly contradictory for MS to take the position, as a matter of policy, that it is too risky for them to ever place confidential business data onto a third party cloud-hosted SaaS system, because that is precisely the risk they are asking every one of their customers to take.

Similarly, if you have concerns about putting your company's source code into GitHub now, you should be equally concerned about putting your company's prerelease annual report on the office365 onedrive.

My company is concerned about that as well. We don’t use any cloud storage from Microsoft or anyone else, and we self host Exchange and SharePoint servers.

That is a good point though, it’s becoming more and more inconvenient for a company to self host everything. Microsoft does stand to benefit from everyone becoming more accustomed to relying on 3rd party services in the cloud.

Serious question: do you think your company has better security than the Azure cloud? Or is it a trust issue with the cloud vendors themselves?

.... and if you don't trust Microsoft: Why use Exchange and such? :-)

Better is relative - especially in one metric: many eggs in one basket make that basket exponentially more attractive to evil actors. Bigger attack surface and whatnot...

Flipside (pro-cloud pov): if the work to protect one egg applies to all eggs, then cloud providers will always hypothetically be able to spend more on security due to economies of scale

Essentially, choose your vulnerability: cloud provider single point of failure or in-house lack of resources

Yup. It all boils down to a business decision, the technical merits are not prevalent for either case.

Maybe info sec drove the decision to purchase github because that was the easier way to reign in the data leak. =)

> I assumed that Microsoft has security policies to ensure that all confidential information (e.g. non-open-source code and strategic discussions) is stored on infrastructure controlled by Microsoft.

It depends on how important the code is.

I don't imagine MS will ever move Office or Windows to external servers, but a lot of other stuff is fair game.

There is always a security/convenience trade off.

I'm almost sure you mean private repos on github.com, but just wanted to confirm it. You don't mean corp github right?

Yep.

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