Data Centers: The Front Line in Cloud Information Warfare

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: Rich Miller.

Corporate data centers are the front line in an escalating battle between electronic attackers and defenders, and must be vigilant about defending their perimeter, cybersecurity guru Winn Schwartau told industry managers in his keynote address this morning at the Data Center World Fall 2012 conference. That’s especially true for leading cloud computing data centers, he said.

“I maintain that cloud computing is critical infrastructure, and we have not taken appropriate steps to protect it,” said Schwartau, who called out a leading cloud provider for its downtime and architecture…

Is The Cloud Resilient Enough?

“I love Amazon,” said Schwartau. “But when you sign up for EC2, you find that backup and redundancy are options, and I just think that’s insane. Backup and redundancy should not be optional for someone providing critical infrastructure.” Schwartau was referring to Amazon’s compute-on-demand cloud computing service, which allows users to deploy virtual servers on Amazon’s data center infrastructure. A recent power outage at an Amazon data center knocked many popular web services offline, highlighting the fact that Amazon users must provision servers across more than one “availability zone” to truly take advantage of the redundancy available across company’s distributed network…

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