A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack can certainly cripple your organization – at least from an IT perspective.

A Distributed Denial of Service attack works like this:

First: An attacker infects thousands of computers around the world—including home computers—via “spreading a virus.”

Second: The attacker instructs each of those thousands of computers to simultaneously create an enormous “Traffic Jam” at some location by flooding that location with data traffic.

The flood of traffic prevents all access to the Internet.

At the recent Black Hat conference, Jeff Moss—the founder of Black Hat, shared that we have to stop DDoS attacks, and attackers can launch traffic jams so huge that it is impossible to thwart the attack.

Every time we find out a way to stop DDoS attacks, attackers take their game to a higher level. There are ways to shore up defenses and the better the defense, the more expensive it is. There is no “guaranteed” protection against a DDoS attack.

Make sure your Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Plan addresses DDoS attacks against your organization. Also address the possibility of losing access to email, VoIP, Online Shopping Carts, web connections, online backup, and “the cloud” as you know.

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• Of course, keep your own backups of your data in case the cloud provider ever loses your data and they cannot restore your data.
• Establish your own business continuity plan. This plan, which you may practice implementing one or more times a year, is what to do if your cloud provider fails.
• Have your legal advisor help you with your contract such that the contract includes clauses for both a service level agreement and a quality of service. The former specifies how much of the time the provider will be up and running for you to use their services. The latter specifies how quickly the service will perform. You want a rapid response as opposed to applications that function so slowly that your user productivity suffers.

Handled correctly the cloud can be very helpful. In case you missed them, the past 3 blog entries discussed the benefits of, cautions for, and dangers of moving to the cloud. Click the links below to read each of those blog posts:

• Big benefits of using the cloud
• Be cautious about using the cloud
• Dangers of using the cloud

Please post your comments on this blog.

The post How to use the cloud wisely appeared first on Foster Institute.

• Making backups of the data you host with them.
• Installing patches to the applications they provide you.
• Performing upgrades to their software and provide business continuity solutions to prepare for when disaster strikes their service.
• Blocking spam for you if you are using hosted e-mail.

Generally with cloud services you and your users can access the cloud applications from practically anywhere using practically any device that has a browser—even a smartphone.

Many cloud services allow month-to-month contracts and they also offer instant scalability so you can add or remove employees/users anytime you like. This means your fees are adjusted accordingly and instantly as your number of users dynamically increases and decreases.

The next two posts will address both cautions and dangers of using the cloud.

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Chief executives and their teams that I visit with seem to be largely polarized. Most of them are very open to switching to cloud services. Then, the other camp is adamantly against trusting their most important data to be stored in the cloud.

The camp “for” using the cloud cite advantages such as:

• No need to worry about backing up your data anymore (I disagree on this one by the way—I feel strongly you need to keep a local copy of your data as well).
• No need to purchase and support the servers that you would otherwise need to host the
  application in-house.
• Built-in disaster recovery options provided by the data center infrastructure. IT professionals at the cloud service are very familiar with configuring and supporting the applications—so there is little if any need for the businesses to keep that expertise in-house.
• and more.

The “against” group adamantly points out they aren’t going to the cloud because:

• They can no longer customize their programs.
• They may lose their important data (like the Amazon example).
• If their office’s Internet connection goes down, they are dead in the water.
• They do not trust their most private data to be hosted in the cloud.
• and more.

With the possible exception of not being able to customize their applications, effective controls exist to mitigate all of the drawbacks listed above.

Where are you? Do you trust the cloud with your online backup service? Do you use hosted e-mail? What else do you put into the cloud? How do the pros outweigh the cons in your decisions?

Please post your comments on this blog.

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