Rational Survivability

It’s interesting to see how people react when they are reminded that the “Cloud” still depends upon much of the same infrastructure and underlying protocols that we have been using for years.

BGP, DNS, VPNs, routers, swtiches, firewalls…

While it’s fun to talk about new attack vectors and sexy exploits, it’s the oldies and goodies that will come back to haunt us:

Building more and more of our business’ ability to remain an on-going concern on infrastructure that was never designed to support it is a scary proposition.  We’re certainly being afforded more opportunity to fix some of these problems as the technology improves, but it’s a patching solution to an endemic problem, I’m afraid.  We’ve got two ways to look at Cloud:

• Skipping over the problems we have and “fixing” crappy infrastructure and applications by simply adding mobility and orchestration to move around an issue, or
• Actually starting to use Cloud as a forcing function to fundamentally change the way we think about, architect, deploy and manage our computing capabilities in a more resilient, reliable and secure fashion

If I were a betting man…

Remember that just because it’s in the “Cloud” doesn’t mean someone’s sprinkled magic invincibility dust on your AppStack…

That web service still has IP addresses, open sockets. It still gets transported over MANY levels of shared infrastructure, from the telcos to the DNS infrastructure…you’re always at someone elses’ mercy.

Dan Kaminsky has done a fabulous job reminding us of that.

A more poignant reminder of our dependency on the Same Old Stuff™ is the recent DDoS attacks against Cloud provider Go-Grid:

ONGOING DDoS ATTACK

Our network is currently the target of a large, distributed DDoS attack that began on Monday afternoon.   We took action all day yesterday to mitigate the impact of the attack, and its targets, so that we could restore service to GoGrid customers.  Things were stabilized by 4 PM PDT and most customer servers were back online, although some of you continued to experience intermittent loss in network connectivity.

This is an unfortunate thing.  It’s also a good illustration of the sorts of things you ought to ask your Cloud service providers about.  With whom do they peer? What is their bandwidth? How many datacenters do they have and where? What DoS/DDoS countermeasures do you have in place? Have they actually dealt with this before?  Do they drill disaster scenarios like this?

We’re told we shouldn’t have to worry about the underlying infrastructure with Cloud, that it’s abstracted and someone else’s problem to manage…until it’s not.

This is where engineering, architecture and security meet the road.  Your provider’s ability to sustain an attack like this is critical.  Further, how you’ve designed your BCP/DR contingency plans is pretty important, too.  Until we get true portability/interoperability between Cloud providers, it’s still up to you to figure out how to make this all work.  Remember that when you’re assuming those TCO calculations accurately reflect reality.

Big providers like eBay, Amazon, and Microsoft invest huge sums of money and manpower to ensure they are as survivable as they can be during attacks like this.  Do you?  Does your Cloud Provider? How many do you have.

Again, even Amazon goes down.  At this point, it’s largely been operational issues on their end and not the result of a massive attack. Imagine, however, if someday it is.  What would that mean to you?

As more and more of our applications and information are moved from inside our networks to beyond the firewalls and exposed to a larger audience (or even co-mingled with others’ data) the need for innovation and advancement in security is only going to skyrocket to start to deal with many of these problems.

/Hoff