The cloud market has been accelerating and evolving for some considerable time now and we all know who the main players are. We have Amazon with AWS, Microsoft Azure and a plethora of other smaller companies. All promise, in part at least that utilising the cloud will cut your costs or/ and enable you to scale easily and quickly.

Is this true though? Well yes it can be if you are already expert in configuring and understanding virtual machines or increasingly, serverless solutions.

We noticed this report though

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/amazon-updates-aws-dashboard-to-warn-admins-when-theyre-exposing-s3-buckets/

This article lists some configuration problems experienced by users, some of them huge companies, which resulted in serious data loss or vulnerabilities.  For example:

  • Top defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton leaks 60,000 files, including employee security credentials and passwords to a US government system.
  • Verizon partner leaks personal records of over 14 million Verizon customers, including names, addresses, account details, and for some victims — account PINs.
  • An AWS S3 server leaked the personal details of WWE fans who registered on the company’s sites. 3,065,805 users were exposed.
  • Another AWS S3 bucket leaked the personal details of over 198 million American voters. The database contained information from three data mining companies known to be associated with the Republican Party.

All of these and many other serious problems listed in the article underline why the big cloud providers aren’t the panacea or an easy solution necessarily, and that it’s essential to have additional  expertise to help sanity check and manage the day to day administration with you.

Blue Sky Hosting have been building, configuring and managing mission critical hosting and application environments for nearly 20 years and we have deep and wide knowledge of how best to achieve your business aims whilst using the technology in the most efficient and secure ways.

If you are thinking of migrating to the cloud, or are already there speak to us now so we can potentially partner with you to ensure your business gets it done right.

Tristan Palmer