3 Reasons Clouds Prevent Cyber-Attacks
Recent cyber-attacks have demonstrated that cloud computers can handle distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that crash traditional servers—for instance, when WikiLeaks briefly hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its latest disclosures. What is it about cloud computers that make them immune to cyber-attacks?
The three main ingredients in cloud computers that make them more resilient against cyber-attacks are elasticity, bandwidth and redundancy.
DDoS attacks usually originate from large numbers of PCs infected with a virus that hackers use to turn them into software bots slaved to a master-control program. By issuing commands to the infected computers, hackers can orchestrate massive numbers of requests all being sent to the same domain simultaneously, denying legitimate users access and in some cases crashing the server.
The main purpose of DDoS attacks is to overflow queues that can only be gracefully reset by taking the site offline. However, cloud computers are uniquely qualified to handle these massive upticks in traffic due to elasticity in their architecture, which immediately brings more resources online to handle surges in requests.
In fact, the whole point of cloud computing is that, since sites do not have to calculate how many servers are needed at any given time, the cloud transparently brings to bear massive computing resources to handle surges—which is why AWS calls one of its services the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
The bottom line is that DDoS attacks alone will not crash typical cloud computers, although Website owners do have to pay for all user requests—even from software bots—so DDoS could run up your cloud computing bill, but it won't crash your site.
The second reason that cloud computers are unaffected by DDoS attacks is that they maintain internal bandwidth that exceeds their provider-supplied Internet bandwidth. Even if an overwhelming number of requests come in from legions of bots, each server in the cloud will always have the internal bandwidth to handle them. Overflow is automatically bumped to new servers that are instantly brought online to handle the increased traffic.
Cloud-based Amazon Web Services (AWS) bring on servers to match the users accessing a Website, thereby thwarting attacks.
The third safety net that cloud computing provides against cyber-attacks is redundancy. For instance, AWS' Simple Storage Service (S3)—which can handle as many as 100,000 requests per second—stores redundant copies of data in multiple locations and handles transparent access to it. Even if hackers are able to bring down one server, the cloud will merely bring in a backup server with redundant data archives to keep programs running uninterrupted.
Source: eWEEK.com
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