What do DDOS attacks mean for Cloud users?
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Last Friday, a DDOS attack disrupted major parts of the internet in both North America and Europe. The attacks seems largely targeted on DNS provider Dyn disrupting access to major service providers such as Level 3, Zendesk, Okta, Github, Paypal, and more, according to sources like Gizmodo. This kind of botnet-driven DDOS attack is a harbinger of future attacks that can be carried out over an increasingly connected device world based on the Internet of Things (IoT) and poorly secured devices.
This disruption highlights a particular vulnerability to businesses that have chosen to rely on cloud-based services like IaaS, SaaS, or PaaS. The ability to connect to these services is critical to business operations and even though the service may be running, if users cannot connect, it is considered downtime. What is particularly scary about these attacks for small and midmarket organizations especially, is that they become victims of circumstance from attacks directed at larger targets.
As the IoT becomes more of a reality, with more and more devices of questionable security joining the internet, the potential for these attacks and their severity can increase. I recently wrote about how to compare cloud computing and on-prem hypercoverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions, and one of the decision points was reliance on the internet. So it is not only a matter of ensuring a stable internet provider, but also the stability of the internet in general with the possibility of attacks targeting a number of different services.
Organizations running services on-prem were not affected by this attack because it did not affect any internal network environments. Choosing to run infrastructure and services internally definitely mitigates the risk of outage from external forces like collateral damage from attacks on service providers. Many organizations that choose cloud services do so for simplicity and convenience because traditional IT infrastructure, even with virtualization, is complex and can be difficult to implement, particularly for small and midsize organizations. It has only been recently that hyperconverged infrastructure has made on-prem infrastructure as simple to use as the cloud.
The future is still uncertain on how organizations will ultimately balance their IT infrastructure between on-prem and cloud in what is loosely called hybrid cloud. Likely it will simply continue to evolve continuously with more emerging technology. At the moment, however, organizations have the choice of easy-to-use hyperconverged infrastructure for increased security and stability, or choose to go with cloud providers for complete hands-off management and third party reliance.
As I mentioned in my cloud vs. HCI article, there are valid reasons to go with either and the solution may likely be a combination of the two. Organizations should be aware that on-prem IT infrastructure no longer needs to be the complicated mess of server vendors, storage vendors, hypervisor vendors, and DR solution vendors. Hyperconverged infrastructure is a viable option for organizations of any size to keep services on-prem, stable, and secure against collateral DDOS damage.
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Updated map - while the effects are lessened,.. they coverage is nearly the same.
