Comment by culi
16 hours ago
You don't need better missile defense than AWS. You don't need missile defense at all because you won't be a target. 99.999999% of the land has no missile threat on it. You are actively increasing the threat to your business by running it on the same servers that military contractors run their software on.
> You don't need better missile defense than AWS.
Well, obviously.
> You don't need missile defense at all because you won't be a target.
No, you don't need it because you have offsite backups. And this is completely disconnected from whether you use AWS or DIY.
> you won't be a target.
Of missiles, maybe in this particular conflict, sure. But running a DC is not your core business, so which DC is more likely to be subject to burglary, power outages, diesel shortages (Amazon will have better negotiators than you), fire suppression, hell, private fire departments if needed, etc…
Was missiles or copper thieves the biggest threat, even there, in 2020? Would AWS or every small company be better at protecting against the latter?
In a war where schools and bridges and aid convoys and bread lines are targeted, anyone should consider themselves a valid target.
It's true that you are less likely to be a target than a state-sponsored tech megacorp's data centers, but the risk is still present.
> In a war where schools and bridges and aid convoys and bread lines are targeted
Yes but that's clearly not this war. This is a missile war where high-value strategic military targets are the priority. The US and Israel hit some prisons, damaged some hospitals, and ofc killed 168 schoolchildren. They also targeted residential areas to assassinate important leaders. But Iran has not returned that. They've stuck pretty strictly to military targets with very few exceptions
If this was a war where bridges were a target, Iran would not be so successful. There's simply a too limited amount of missiles. Also only 20% of Saudi Arabia has citizenship while almost the whole rest is basically indentured servants. It's not like they could provoke a popular uprising or anything. There's no strategic value in hitting "bread lines"
An AWS data center is going to look like a bright shining beacon on the CARVER matrix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARVER_matrix
What CARVER score would you give an AWS data center? I would probably put it around the 40 to 50s. Where would you put your own individual company by itself on the CARVER matrix as it relates to enemy forces? Pretty damn low.
Which is why your job as a responsible company you should have verified your offsite backups on 28th Feb.
Just like you would if wildfires started breaking new records in Oregon, if that's where your (for some reason sole) cloud region is.
It should already be set up, of course, but from a data point of view this is when you're thankful that at least this raised risk came with a heads up.
Risk is always present, We quantify it for a reason and then we mitigate if it's beyond a level we are comfortable.
Living is risk, every time I go to the shop for milk there is a non-zero chance I don't come back but the risk is so low I don't worry about it.
An American-run data center is much more likely to be targeted than some locally-owned and run company that isn't obviously connected to a foriegn power or the state that hosts it.