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Monday, October 24th, 2016
| Time | Event |
| 5:15p | How to Leverage AWS as a Secondary Data Center Lynn LeBlanc is CEO and Founder of Hotlink Corporation. For many enterprises today, running a standalone traditional data center doesn’t cut it. Customers and business partners demand and expect externally-facing applications to be available and performing around the clock, and IT infrastructures need to support this “always-on” mode of business operations. While public cloud services can provide organizations with cost-saving benefits, more importantly from the standpoint of end users and customers, they deliver the agility, scalability and the high availability businesses need. Given the growing importance of public clouds in supporting day-to-day processes, offerings such as AWS can serve very effectively as secondary data centers for companies. Enterprises can now build “cloud-attached” data centers, in which they can quickly and easily incorporate public cloud resources into their existing production data centers – without complex system integration projects. Cloud-attached data centers are similar in concept to network-attached storage platforms, whereby all data center resources are shared across the entire environment. Companies actually “attach” the AWS public cloud to their on-premise environment and then utilize a shared pool of resources. This includes the ability to use existing management and operational workflows for cloud-based services, without adding the complexity usually associated with linking together disparate data infrastructure types. This unified management approach is key to reaping the benefits of a secondary data center in AWS at price points that almost any company can afford. After all, the promise of what the pay-as-you-go public cloud resources becomes irrelevant if it’s unmanageable day-to-day. Cloud-attached solutions address these concerns by providing an efficient way to manage the internal and external IT environments, leveraging tools, workflows and skills already in place. And one of the most appealing aspects of the cloud-attached data center is that it can be deployed by organizations of any size and in any sector. It also addresses a number of broadly appealing use cases. The Best Use Cases for Today’s Cloud-Attached Data Centers1. Cloud-attached data centers are ideal for disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) programs. According to industry research, most organizations are not prepared, and if a disaster should strike, they won’t be able to quickly recover. In the always-on data center, this has real dollars attached. A cloud-attached data center provides the protection companies need. With the AWS cloud as the secondary data center, enterprises and even smaller companies can have assurances that systems and applications will remain available in any type of outage — even in the midst of a large regional event such as a hurricane or disruption to the power grid. 2. Another use case is bursting to the cloud. Many companies, including those in sectors like retail and shipping, experience peaks in demand for systems and capacity during specific times of year, such as holidays and popular vacations times. AWS and other public cloud services are ideal for this type of fluctuating demand. The on-premise data center can serve as the steady-state resource, while AWS can help handle the increased workloads during the peak demand periods. This helps to avoid over- and under-provisioning by IT. From an economic standpoint this is ideal for companies with seasonal businesses. They only have to pay for the capacity they need when they need it, so this keeps costs under control. 3. Cloud-attached data centers are also optimal for hybrid IT operations. Many organizations are likely to operate IT infrastructures that take advantage of the cloud for select applications and their own on-premise servers for others. A cloud-attached data center can provide the management platform needed so that companies can administer, monitor and manage the entire hybrid environment from one pane of glass. 4. Finally, companies need to deliver applications customers quickly, so the development and testing process timeline needs to be as short as possible – and it shrinks every year. Cloud-attached data centers are ideal for supporting a rapid development and testing cycle, making an unlimited pool of compute resources available on a moment’s notice. Having a cloud-attached data center that leverages a public cloud service like AWS can transform a company’s IT infrastructure and help enable a rapid return on investment for hybrid IT infrastructure. With the right architecture in place for streamlined and effective management of internal and external IT resources, organizations can enjoy the best of both IT worlds – low cost with virtually infinite capacity — to meet the growing computing demands of the always-on data center. Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library. |
| 5:31p | Was Friday’s DDoS Attack Part of a Troubling Trend?  Brought to You by The WHIR Regardless of whether you work in the hosting industry, you would have likely encountered an outage Friday on a website that you may visit frequently, due to a DDoS attack targeting Dyn. You can read the news story here. A DDoS attack on an individual website can cause lots of issues in and of itself, but a DDoS attack on a DNS network has a much bigger impact. Friday’s DDoS attack impacted sites ranging from Twitter to AirBnb to The New York Times and, even to PagerDuty, a site that helps alert you of downtime. In an emailed statement, Dave Larson, Corero COO, explained how DDoS attacks against DNS providers can be particularly damaging. “DDoS attacks targeted specifically against Domain Name Service (DNS) Providers can be especially damaging – not only for the intended victim – but from the perspective that there will also be significant collateral damage. A DDoS attack, regardless of the vector or technique utilized, against a DNS operator targeting a domain or group of domains can effectively shut down service to that domain, as well as any other domains serviced in a particular region. Innocent bystanders are immediately impacted until the attack subsides or a resolution is put into place,” Larson said in a statement. “DNS providers are central to the operation of the internet and must consider DDoS attacks as a critical availability issue and maintain automated mitigation techniques in order to protect their customers from this breed of attack. Cloud based DDoS mitigation services which rely on human intervention, and re–routing of internet traffic in the event of DDoS will not suffice in these attack situations.” The unfortunate thing is that last week’s event is not isolated. The WHIR has reported recently on a DDoS attack that reached 665 Gbps in size, and forced Akamai to drop Brian Krebs’ website from its DDoS mitigation service. Brian Krebs, in a post on his website, explained why DDoS attacks are growing in size. Until Dyn releases a post-mortem of the attack, the size of it will likely remain unknown. “The size of these DDoS attacks has increased so much lately thanks largely to the broad availability of tools for compromising and leveraging the collective firepower of so-called Internet of Things devices — poorly secured Internet-based security cameras, digital video recorders (DVRs) and Internet routers. Last month, a hacker by the name of Anna_Senpai released the source code for Mirai, a crime machine that enslaves IoT devices for use in large DDoS attacks. The 620 Gbps attack that hit my site last month was launched by a botnet built on Mirai, for example.” This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/s |
| 5:46p | Chinese Firm Says Its Cameras Were Used to Take Down Internet (Bloomberg) — A Chinese security camera maker said its products were used to launch a cyber-attack that severed internet access for millions of users, highlighting the threat posed by the global proliferation of connected devices. The attackers hijacked CCTV cameras made by Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology Co. using malware known as Mirai, the company said in an e-mailed statement. While Xiongmai didn’t say how many of its products had been infiltrated, all cameras made before September 2015 were potentially vulnerable. The attack, which took down sites including Twitter, Spotify and CNN for long stretches, underscored how hackers can marshal an increasing number of online gadgets, collectively known as the Internet of Things, to disrupt the internet on an unprecedented scale. “Mirai is a huge disaster for the Internet of Things. XM have to admit that our products also suffered from hacker’s break-in and illegal use,” Xiongmai said in its e-mail. Millions of internet users lost access to some of the world’s most popular websites on Friday after hackers hammered servers along the U.S. East Coast with phony traffic until they crashed, then moved westward. The attackers hit Dyn Inc., a provider of Domain Name System services. Agencies including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security are investigating the outage but the perpetrators remain unknown. Read more: Hackers Take Down Sites From New York to LA in Web-Host Siege Xiongmai said products made before September 2015 were vulnerable because they ran on older firmware, or software hard-wired into devices. The company urged users to update their firmware and change their default usernames and passwords. Security professionals have anticipated an increase in attacks from malware that target connected gadgets. In Friday’s instance, hackers launched a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack using tens of millions of malware-infected devices connected to the internet, according to Kyle York, Dyn’s chief strategy officer. While DDoS attacks don’t steal anything, they create havoc across the Internet. See also: Was Friday’s DDoS Attack Part of a Troubling Trend? |
| 6:15p | Rackspace Boosts International Team, Opens Munich Office  Brought to You by Talkin’ Cloud Managed cloud provider Rackspace announced it has appointed two new executives to its international team. Reinhard Waldinger has been promoted to Managing Director, International, and Alex Fuerst, Regional Leader for DACH. The appointments come as Rackspace, which recently went private in a $4.3 billion buyout, is opening a new office in Munich that will help support the growth of its German-speaking customers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Waldinger has worked at Rackspace for more than 10 years. Previously, Waldinger was VP of Finance for Rackspace International. In his new role he will work with customers, partners and employees in its international operations. “As we continue to expand into new regions, I look forward to using my experience of working at Rackspace for over a decade to drive the expansion and grow the business,” Waldinger said in a statement. “With more organisations now using multiple cloud providers, we are uniquely positioned with the technical expertise, business acumen and outstanding customer support to help these businesses succeed.” Fuerst joins Rackspace after a 15 year career in IT. He has worked at companies including Siemens AG, Motorola, Avaya and Acronis. “Having grown up around Bodensee — at the heart of the DACH region — I am excited to bring local knowledge to my new role at Rackspace,” Fuerst said. “Our goal is to become the largest Managed Cloud provider in Germany, Switzerland and Austria by leveraging our deep expertise in OpenStack, Azure and AWS. Whatever size a business is, they are in good hands at Rackspace and will receive high-quality, personal, anytime support. As well as the gradual expansion of the Munich office and its customer base, we’ll be focusing on growing our channel strategy with our industry partners.” This first ran at http://talkincloud.com/cloud-services/ra |
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