SMARTER STRATEGIES

3 Reasons Clouds Prevent Cyber-Attacks

R. Colin Johnson | Date: 12-13-10 | Comments

Recent cyber-attacks have shown that cloud computers are resilient to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that overwhelm traditional Web servers. Here are three reasons why cloud computers are able to thwart cyber-attackers.

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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.

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