Are Data Centers Good War Targets?

How numerous have data centers become? They even exist in the Middle East where many Westerners might not expect them to be. Three such data centers, two in United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain, owed by Amazon Web Services, were hit by Iranian drone strikes. Such strikes show their vulnerability when it comes to political conflicts between opposing nations.

The company’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, stated, “These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage.” Unlike previous AWS disruptions involving software that resulted in widespread global outages, these attacks involved physical damage to the facilities. AWS claims only localized and limited disruption.

Amazon Web Services hosts many of the world’s most-used online services, providing behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure to many government departments, universities and businesses. Therein, lies yet another issue that we should be concerned about. Attacks on data centers could wreck havoc with operations, both government and corporate, that find it necessary to store everything on the cloud. Readers of my blog should know I’m not a fan of cloud storage.

“Amazon has generally configured its services so that the loss of a single data center would be relatively unimportant to its operations,” said Mike Chapple, an IT professor at Mendoza College of Business. He emphasized that other data centers in the same zone can take over, and most of the time this happens seamlessly.

On the other hand, “That said, the loss of multiple data centers within an availability zone could cause serious issues, as things could reach a point where there simply isn’t enough remaining capacity to handle all the work.”

As I implied above, that’s something we should be concerned about. Governments rely on the cloud. Hospitals rely on the cloud, as well as large companies including grocers, payment services, and banking institutions. Let’s not forget our social media accounts where too many of us get our unreliable news from.

Companies include: Apple, Capitol One, Comcast, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Netflix, Notre Dame, Salesforce, State Farm, Toyota, Verizon, and others. As we become more dependent on ‘the machines”, we also become less capable should those machines break down.

Amazon doesn’t typically disclose the exact number of data centers it operates around the world. It does state that its data centers are clustered in 39 geographic regions, with three such regions in the Middle East (United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Israel). AWS says its data centers have redundant water, power, telecom, and internet connections “so we can maintain continuous operations in an emergency.” I’m not sure I believe the redundancy argument, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt… for now.

AWS has physical security, including security guards, fences, video surveillance and alarm systems, which are designed to keep out intruders. Missile attacks, though, are a different story. Attacks are a reminder that cloud computing requires large, hard-to-hide ground-based physical facilities, making them vulnerable to all sorts of disaster scenarios. Quality security requires your own in-house backup plan.

Source used: Associated Press