[jason-phillips]

> the courthouse network setup blocks the site for Chrome users if I use Cloudflare

Lovely.

As my local county attorney told the court, "We will not be using the cloud because it is not secure," this doesn't surprise me. The bane of local governments strikes again.

[MichaelZuo]

Aren't they correct?

I would ballpark Delaware court IT security requirements as similar to DoD Secret level clearance.

And as far as I understand a higher security cloud solution is usually a custom ask and really expensive at any of the major providers, simply not affordable for smaller organizations.

[jason-phillips]

> Aren't they correct?

Not in my professional estimation, unless you want to reduce the argument to absurdly pedantic levels.

My quick response to the county government was for immediate effect, "The CIA uses AWS."

[MichaelZuo]

So do you know how much more expensive a solution, that can meet their Secret classification, is compared to regular AWS?

[tracker1]

Most of the cloud providers (at least AWS/Azure) charge about 15-20% more for the "government" data centers. It's really not that much more. It's also not really much different, just slightly more auditing, if any difference at all. You also don't have to strictly be a government agency, you can also be a government contractor.

From what I understand, the infrastructure is really, technically, exactly the same, but just limited to certain customers. It's also, generally speaking going to be as, or more secure than any self-managed datacenter connected to the internet. The transparency could probably be a bit better.

note: used to work for a government contractor that received a LOT of hacking effort as a target.

[joshspankit]

“There is no cloud it’s just [computers]”

Since “cloud” is actually a marketing term (usually meaning virtualized servers), any company or department who says no to any mention of using the cloud is showing willful ignorance.

[bombcar]

If you know you don’t know enough, demanding paper documents makes sense. It takes quite a bit of study and knowledge to determine that a “cloud document” cannot be changed or altered after submission (and by whom).

[pc86]

Or the ability to trust subject-matter experts who know better than you.

[bombcar]

One thing judges know is how they can get burned by experts - and they know to whom the liability falls if something goes wrong.