Building safety into the cloud

A spate of recent high-profile outages and intrusions into cloud networks demonstrates the real risk of using these services for critical operations.

In April, a problem in Amazon's data centre caused outages for its Web Services customers. Also that month, Epsilon, the world's largest “permission-based” email marketing provider, announced that the address lists belonging to its customers had been exposed through a successful hack of its systems. And the highly advanced breach into security company RSA announced in March led to the compromise of information about its SecurID products, which include hardware token authenticators, software authenticators, authentication agents and appliances supported over the web.

All these cases impacted the customers who used web services to run their business or support network operations. The RSA breach potentially blew the security out of millions of multifactor authentication applications. The Epsilon case ultimately eroded customer trust in their email from Citi, Chase and numerous other affected retail and financial outlets. And the Amazon outage highlighted how a physical data center problem can impact multiple web services customers hosted there (including, in this case, HootSuite, Reddit, Foursquare and others).