The Anti-virus Times

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

It’s a widespread myth that your data is safe when you put it in the cloud because the cloud storage provider is responsible for the cloud’s servers and protects them professionally. Unfortunately, in reality that’s not always true.

In most cases, the “cloud” is a dedicated server in a data center (DC), a virtual server or a service provided by a company that also uses data centers.

Like any enterprise, a data center relies on the use of electricity and an Internet connection to function. Like all machines and mechanisms, servers can breakdown. Fires, floods, avalanches, and hardware failures affect servers as well as the places in which they are located. And lightning strikes can also affect them.

In August 2015, during a thunderstorm in Belgium, lightning struck the Google data center four times. Due to this natural disaster, users of the Google Computer Engine (GCE) — a file-sharing service — lost access to their files because the drives were physically damaged.

Of course, such situations are extremely rare, but DDoS attacks are a daily reality in the work of cloud service providers.

To date, no data center has escaped a DDoS attack. Moreover, some data centers experience 100+ DDoS attacks per month! Data center owners believe such attacks to be the greatest risk to their business.

This trend is not random: the more companies store their information remotely, the more attackers are interested in the places where information is being stored. And this trend will only continue to grow.

Any DDoS attack means that data owners will not be able to access their data for an indeterminate period of time, with all the attendant consequences.