On Friday, October 22, everyone who uses the internet was under attack.
Amazon, Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb, The New York Times—all were inaccessible for hours. From our partners, Box.com and SugarSync were also down.
Image source: Wikipedia
This Attack Was Different
We’ve seen a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks before. But not like this.
Past DDoS attacks have mostly targeted a single website. Friday’s attack went after a middleman, a little-known company called Dyn.
Dyn is something like a post office for the internet. When you click a link to Amazon, for example, your computer sends a request to servers managed by companies like Dyn, which route your request to Amazon so you can go shopping.
But by targeting Dyn, hackers did much more damage than past attacks. Instead of blocking access to one site, a lengthy list of sites and services were inaccessible.
Why This Matters to You
Cloud-based services have become central to how many businesses do business.
As we saw on Friday, if you use Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, Gmail, Office 365, Slack, or any other cloud-based service to run your business, it could be gone in an instant.
When attacks happen, you have no promise of when you’ll regain access to your files and data. Your access could be blocked for a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, or even longer.
If you store files and data in the cloud, you need a backup plan for what you’ll do if your cloud service goes down.
Failover: Protection Against Cyber Attacks
Failover is a method of protecting computer systems in which standby equipment automatically takes over when the main system fails.
In cloud computing, failover means having a real-time backup of all your files on a secondary cloud storage service.
For example, if you keep all your files in Microsoft Office 365 Sharepoint, a failover solution would create and maintain a real-time backup of your Sharepoint database in Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, or the storage solution of your choice.
If Sharepoint goes down, you’ll still have access to all your files and data via Dropbox.
Failover Is Affordable, Secure, and Simple
Failover is secure and easy to implement. It can also be done at a very reasonable cost—especially compared to the cost of losing access to all your data, files, and documents.
cloudHQ’s two-way syncing service can quickly and easily create a failover solution for you with just a few minutes of setup.
Once a failover solution is in place, it runs automatically in the background. If your primary cloud storage solution goes down for any reason, simply switch to the failover solution and continue you work.
When your primary storage solution comes back online, cloudHQ will automatically update all your documents and files to reflect any changes you made while it was down.
You Need a Failover Solution
Bottom line: you need a failover solution.
No one knows when these attacks will happen, but everyone agrees the attacks aren’t going to stop anytime soon.
A failover solution will keep you up and running, even when the internet is under attack.