Migrating to Cloud Computing

John Cunningham — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 20:56:29 +0000

Imagine that you could click a few buttons and migrate your environment from a dedicated server to a cloud computing platform. You won’t have to imagine for very long because that’s something that we’re working on right now.

It seems that one of the biggest obstacles for entry into cloud computing is the migration from your old server. We are working hard to find the best way to migrate dedicated servers or managed servers with very little input (or risk) from the end user. That would include migration of your operating system, all installed applications and of course, your precious data.

Testing has gone very well and we are confident we can roll this out in the very near future. At a minimum this provides a mechanism to get you quickly and easily into cloud computing and enjoying all of the benefits while sidestepping the hassles of a typical server migration.

Another area that is of great interest for us is helping clients migrate from server co-location to cloud computing. It’s essentially the same thing as migrating a dedicated server but the benefits and cost savings would be off the charts. We are still in the testing phase but making excellent progress and we expect to push something out to the public very soon. We have already successfully migrated from various platforms and the response from our techs is always the same, jaw-dropping ease and mind numbing efficiency.

Stand by for more news on this exciting development as we continue working hard to bring you the best cloud computing platform available.

DDOS Attacks on the Cloud

Christopher Leisure — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:28:10 +0000

Recently, I’ve been thinking about how easy it could be to potentially launch a large scale DDOS attack utilizing cloud service providers. With certain providers, you can set instances to launch automatically, run scripts, initiate the attack, and then shut itself down all without even being near your computer. Utilizing multiple providers and different zones/data centers within one company could amount to a very large scale DDOS. A lot of companies lack sufficient DDOS protection and even those which can detect and mitigate, are still susceptible to outgoing attacks. One quick and easy way would be to initiate your instance and have it attack for 5-10 minutes, then shut itself down and restart the process on a new instance with a new IP. Repeating this process with 200-300 instances per service provider and per zone in some cases could create a very large attack.

Obviously, the cloud provider would figure out what was going on and disable your account. How long this could take would depend on the company and how vigilant they are about monitoring their cloud. A way around this however would be to use stolen credit cards and create multiple accounts on each provider. Once an account has been shutdown an individual could then start bringing up instances on another one of the accounts they have. You could potentially have an unlimited number of accounts on a provider given you have enough stolen credit card numbers.

Using multiple proxy servers or internet cafés would prevent the cloud provider from blocking you at their signup page. With the number of free Wi-Fi points today you could easily do this while hopping from one free access to point to another in any large metropolitan. The cloud providers that use a completely automated signup would be most vulnerable to this type of attack. While using various cloud providers, I have yet to run into one that manually verifies a signup with something such as a telephone call to the card owner.

If anyone has any information on previous attacks launched from a cloud provider I would be very interested in hearing about it. I’m also curious to hear about any security measures that are being put in place to potentially keep an individual from launching such an attack.

-Chris

Migrating to Cloud Computing

1-800-HOSTING Blog » Cloud Hosting

Migrating to Cloud Computing

Related Posts

DDOS Attacks on the Cloud

Related Posts