Amazon's Christmas slip up shows risks in the cloud

OMG a piece of computer equipment failed, the sky is falling.

I really think people blow "IT Outages" out of proportion. These things happen, cars break down, planes crash, boats sink, space shuttles explode and computer equipment breaks. No matter how many redundancies, or how much N+X technology you put in place, at some point in time something will break and there will be downtime, its just the nature of IT. Now provided it only occurring occasionally that's fine.
 
Cloud computing - entrusting your important data and personal information to some bunch of arseholes you have never met and having to then go to church each Sunday to pray they don't lose it, use it themselves, sell it to a third party, get shut down by the Eff Bee Eye, get forced to release it on a court order in a country you have never visited: then to make an offering to the Blessed Virgin to ask her to intercede to prevent the SAT3 cable from snapping at year-end. Fork dit, as they say here in Borksburg.
 
Outages of some sort seem to be a regular thing with Amazon and their cloud services. This isnt a case of just some hardware failing. It's a huge loss of income for a company like Netflix who do massive business over this time of year. Quite surprising that it happens!
 
There's plenty of other cloud computing providers out there with 100% up time(thus far) and 100% SLA's

Why would you host with Amazon?
 
rwenzori said:
Cloud computing - entrusting your important data and personal information to some bunch of arseholes you have never met and having to then go to church each Sunday to pray they don't lose it, use it themselves, sell it to a third party, get shut down by the Eff Bee Eye, get forced to release it on a court order in a country you have never visited: then to make an offering to the Blessed Virgin to ask her to intercede to prevent the SAT3 cable from snapping at year-end. Fork dit, as they say here in Borksburg.
Click to expand...

No no no. The cloud is where it's at! All the cool [-]tech experts with their MSc and PhD degrees[/-] journalists with their BA(obsolete literature) degrees say so. Why wouldn't you want to pay more for a less reliable system that gives you lower security and less control. Everything will be on the cloud within <hallelujah chorus> Five Years </hallelujah chorus>.
 
grim said:
There's plenty of other cloud computing providers out there with 100% up time(thus far) and 100% SLA's

Why would you host with Amazon?
Click to expand...


Because amazon is still the best out there, very few systems wouldn't fall over with the traffic and processing power and those people are just too far behind amazon in this regard (ie. google)
 
rwenzori said:
Cloud computing - entrusting your important data and personal information to some bunch of arseholes you have never met and having to then go to church each Sunday to pray they don't lose it, use it themselves, sell it to a third party, get shut down by the Eff Bee Eye, get forced to release it on a court order in a country you have never visited: then to make an offering to the Blessed Virgin to ask her to intercede to prevent the SAT3 cable from snapping at year-end. Fork dit, as they say here in Borksburg.
Click to expand...

Who do you trust your data too then? Vodacom, mtn, didata? Set up your own data centre... good luck with that.
 
Biggest question for me wrt cloudservices is "Who owns your data and who’s responsible if your information is lost or damaged?". Many South African businesses shift their data to international cloud services without understanding TOS and privacy policy.

Copyright, confidentiality and legal aspects of data stored in the cloud can become a major headache, as laws affecting those areas differ from country to country. It becomes very blurred if data is created in one country and then stored in another.

You can very well build your private cloud hosted on your own equipment in South Africa. You have complete ownership and control over your data and can legally pursue all entities providing you with services in this country - something you will struggle to achieve with an international cloud service provider.
 
rwenzori said:
Cloud computing - entrusting your important data and personal information to some bunch of arseholes you have never met and having to then go to church each Sunday to pray they don't lose it, use it themselves, sell it to a third party, get shut down by the Eff Bee Eye, get forced to release it on a court order in a country you have never visited: then to make an offering to the Blessed Virgin to ask her to intercede to prevent the SAT3 cable from snapping at year-end. Fork dit, as they say here in Borksburg.
Click to expand...
Wow, never knew someone could have such an extreme view on something as simple as cloud computing. I take it you dont work in IT?

Our business has moved everything we can into the cloud and its both improved productivity and brought down costs and we havent had 1 minute downtime in two years :)

I have literally moved over 100 of my clients into the cloud and not one of them has had a single problem with it, or reverted from it.

rwenzori said:
Er... me??
Click to expand...
Your house gets broken into (this is SA and it happens ALL the time) and someone steals it? We have all our data in the cloud, but we also have local backups. Our data is more safe than yours. Unless you are putting your data into a safe on another premises. Also, you run windows 7 if I remember correctly? So easy to hack :)
 
Last edited:
Drunkard #1 said:
No no no. The cloud is where it's at! All the cool [-]tech experts with their MSc and PhD degrees[/-] journalists with their BA(obsolete literature) degrees say so. Why wouldn't you want to pay more for a less reliable system that gives you lower security and less control. Everything will be on the cloud within <hallelujah chorus> Five Years </hallelujah chorus>.
Click to expand...

Its actually more a linux push.... Windows Azure is still playing catch up...
 
I still find a mix to work best for my situation. Cloud based solutions have a definite advantage for certain things but for other functions I keep the data and service local. I still think the whole thing was overhyped with amazon, as was mentioned before things go down sometimes.
I saw quite a lot of outrage happening with gopro cameras because users couldnt update firmware over Christmas on new devices due to the outage.
 
Rocket-Boy said:
I still find a mix to work best for my situation. Cloud based solutions have a definite advantage for certain things but for other functions I keep the data and service local. I still think the whole thing was overhyped with amazon, as was mentioned before things go down sometimes.
I saw quite a lot of outrage happening with gopro cameras because users couldnt update firmware over Christmas on new devices due to the outage.
Click to expand...

The cloud service I use for my servers is three cloud solution. One cloud in Stockholm, one cloud in Thule and one cloud in a nuclear bunker. They all sync with each other. Each cloud is fed by multiple power and data suppliers. Theoretically my data should survive a nuclear hit. I havent had a minutes downtime.

I dont host with Amazon :D But issues like the Gopro not been able to update could just as easily have happened on legacy system.
 
rwenzori said:
Very interesting. What sort of data is it that you store?
Click to expand...

Websites, web applications. When our clients need always up web applications (like audit, accounting or booking systems... ), I put them there. I host here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pionen - Same place wikileaks is hosted. I originally went to them for their advanced ddos protection.

I also put documents and email into Google Apps often. However, I always always always have an off-cloud backup.
 
Just need to correct myself, the two redundent clouds are both in Stockholm.

Ultimate security for your virtual server!

Your virtual server will be protected in our nuclear bunker Pionen White Mountains. It will also be mirrored on two other data centres in Stockholm, giving it triple redundancies and security.

Pionen White Mountains is located in a former military command centre from the Cold War. It is situated over 30 meters into the bedrock under Vitabergsparken in central Stockholm and is said to still be able to cope with a nuclear attack. This means that your server is secure even if the worst happens. To increase the protection it also has an advanced entry systems deployed to ensure that unauthorized access to your server is not possible.

Everything in Pionen is doubled. The optical fibre that connects the data centre to the Internet access the datacentre via different physical paths, the same goes for the electricity. There are dual UPS facilities and dual diesel generators in the event of longer power loss. With your virtual server located in Pionen White Mountains, you can feel safe and sure that your server will always be online.
Click to expand...
http://www.bahnhof.net/security
 
ghoti said:
Websites, web applications. When our clients need always up web applications (like audit, accounting or booking systems... ), I put them there.
Click to expand...

Would you not say those are traditional web-based applications? Or is anything up on a web server anywhere now a "cloud" application?

Now your Führerbunker safety and redundancy scheme looks very nice. Admirable, even. Of course, by having everything in triplicate, you also triple your confidentiality risks - really only if your clients' competitors have any interest in the data - most business data is not worth the hack as it were, but not all. And you also fall foul of Rwenzori's Law of Database Duplication - "Duplicate databases aren't". Well, at least at most points in time anyway.

And yes, I do work in the industry, and have for over 30 years now. Which is probably why I am suspicious and untrusting of giving access and control of data to third parties, and of web developers, the majority of whom seem unutterably incompetent when it comes to anything more than a few simple pages. I can throw my internet banking into error at will, for example, wif a simple single click. Heaven only knows if anyone tests this sort of crap. I would never have let any of my development teams get away with it back when I was running development.
 
rwenzori said:
Would you not say those are traditional web-based applications? Or is anything up on a web server anywhere now a "cloud" application?
Click to expand...
Traditional web applications running on machines virtualized in a cloud environment. Instead of my virtual server hosted on one machine, its virtualized in 3 different datacenters over much hardware and is more resilient to single points of hardware failure.

On traditional systems you used to run say a hardware server running many virtual machines. When there was a critical failure in the hardware your site could go down. Now if a server fails another server in the cloud takes over. If a datacenter goes down another datacenter in the cloud takes over.

The data is as encrypted as I decide to make it. Make an encrypted virtual disk if you are paranoid. Run your database connection through an ssh tunnel for all I care. Thats kinda up to you and how you admin.

I have very secure and stable data :) I also choose my cloud hosts carefully. Your PC is so much more hackable than clouds like that run by Google and Pionen. They have teams of dedicated infosec specialists helping me secure my data.

As I said, one of the reasons I chose them is one of my sites were under attack and they were the only people I trusted who had the network equipment to filter out that attacks. I would have had to pay well over R150 000 for suitable ddos mitigation if I hosted traditionally and here in SA.

My cloud also comes with a free beer. : http://www.bahnhof.net/beer
 
Last edited:
Stuff like Google Business Apps bring great benefit to SME`s in terms of data security rwenzori. Ill give you an example. Most SME can not afford full time IT staff and take up SLA`s with PC and server support companies. They have to trust whoever they call knows what they are doing and has competent staff at the time. For most of them they are already trusting their data to 3rd parties.... and in many cases to incompetent 3rd parties. Something like Google Business Apps is a way better option than say to a traditionally hosted Exchange box. Its better value for money, more stable and more secure.

Sure if you are a massive company or a bank or whatever. Build your own cloud if you can afford it. Many companies do build their own clouds.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X