Under Siege - Amazon get´s the better deal again

Recently a DDoS attack hit various services provided by Amazon which left many users wanting to access its various web based services. Amazon being one of the biggest e-commerce vendors does have a huge customer base, any attack which renders it inactive for any amount of time affects its business by thousands if not millions of dollars. Even though the attack lasted a few minutes, the entire situation was brought under control within an hour. The attack was limited to Northern California in the USA. Due to the attack on Amazon, several of its services like S3, EC2 were affected which in turn rendered loads of websites offline.

If sites like Amazon can be hit by such attacks then what about smaller sites with limited resources available? Are we fully prepared to adapt to keeping our data on the cloud when such an attack can render our data inaccessible to us? Wouldn’t keeping all the data at a big storage make it vulnerable to attacks? If an attacker wants to attack a particular client hosted on a server like S3, wouldn’t such an attack render every other client hosted on the server inaccessible? Who is accountable for loss occurring to a client because of such an attack?

My perspective is that we should never trust anyone with our data. If the data is of paramount importance keep it with you rather than keeping it with a storage provider. Keep a backup of everything of importance to you, in case you do go ahead with using such a service. Check the security services that you are provided by the data hosting site. Always read the fine print of a contract before signing on one!

Read more HERE