ThousandEyes conducted its research across the world’s top 5 public cloud providers – IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Alibaba Cloud. The aim of the report is to help business leaders make the right decision in adopting cloud.

The most significant results

Key findings from the report revealed that, slightly controversially, some cloud providers rely on the public internet to transport traffic, rather than their own support. Google Cloud and Azure were found to use their own private backbone networks, which helps with protection from the performance variation associated with delivering over the public internet. Whilst AWS and Alibaba Cloud rely heavily on the public internet, leading to greater operational risk. IBM’s approach varies regionally.

The geographical locations that have the highest performance variations across all cloud are Latin America and Asia.

Despite the fee, AWS Global Accelerator (which uses a private network), doesn’t always work as well as the public Internet. It was also discovered that the choice of broadband ISP makes a difference to the cloud and the type of broadband picked to connect each cloud even makes a difference to performance loss and gain.

A final key finding is that each cloud provider has to pay a fee when crossing China’s Great Firewall. Even Alibaba, which is based in China.

Missing performance data

Archana Kesavan, research author and director of product marketing at ThousandEyes said: “When businesses need to decide which cloud provider best meets their needs, one metric that’s notably missing from their assessments has been performance data, mainly because it’s never been available or has, at best, been myopic.”

“The second annual Cloud Performance Benchmark gives businesses that comparative data. Understanding cloud performance is essential for planning and for ongoing measurement so you can be assured that you’re providing customers and employees with the best possible performance,” Kesavan added.

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Data from Link11’s Security Operation Center (LSOC) shows that a quarter of all DDoS attacks in Europe in the 12 months from July 2017 to June 2018 used public cloud server-based botnets, compared to 18.5% in the previous 12 months – a 35% increase.

During the 12 months to June 2018, Microsoft Azure was the cloud service most exploited for DDoS attacks, with 38.7% of such attacks using Azure servers on average.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) was used in 32.7% of attacks on average, and Alibaba servers used in 17.9% of attacks. Google servers were abused much less often, used in only 10.7% of attacks.

Cloud server-based botnets

According to Link11, public cloud server-based botnets are the ideal platform for launching DDoS attacks.

Cloud instances generally offer bandwidths of between 1 and 10 Gbps, enabling attack volumes which can be as much as 1000 times higher than is possible with individual compromised devices such as home routers or IoT cameras.

The LSOC reported that the peak attack volumes of these cloud-based attacks exceeded 150 Gbps in May. Cloud servers provide memcached or SSDP services, which amplify attack volumes.

Aatish Pattni, Regional Director UK & Ireland, Link11, comments:  “The people behind DDoS attacks are embracing the use of public cloud services for the same reasons as legitimate organisations: the services provide flexible, on-demand capacity and resources, and can be provisioned in just a few minutes.

Threat actors

“For threat actors, the benefits are even more compelling because they will often use stolen credit card details and false identities to pay for the services. This makes the perpetrators almost impossible to trace, even though providers such as Amazon are taking strong action against misuse, and asking users to report any suspected abuse of their services.”

To protect against DDoS attacks launched using public cloud services, blocking traffic from these services is not an option for many organisations because they will already be using the public cloud as part of their own IT infrastructures.

Data traffic

Instead, organisations should analyse in detail the communication between public cloud services and their own network, and monitor for malicious or unwanted traffic.

Ongoing analysis of data traffic, using machine-learning techniques, enables legitimate traffic to be profiled and fingerprinted, so that any changes can be detected quickly and reliably.

The malicious traffic can then be filtered out in a granular manner before it can impact the organisation’s business, without blocking legitimate traffic.

Written from press release by Leah Alger

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The American coffee company will be opting out of using Azure systems so it can utilise Alibaba’s broader range of services.

Currently, Starbucks is working on Alibaba’s food delivery platform Ele.me before expanding its delivery services to 2,000 stores in 30 other Chinese cities before the end of 2018.

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Amazon leads the cloud with US$15.9billion, while Microsoft has brought in US$5billion, Google US$1.9billion and Alibaba US$1.4billion, according to Business Insider.

Bellini wrote in a note to clients: “We believe that share will continue to consolidate around the largest platforms into an oligopolistic market structure.”

She also noted Amazon is trading stock at US$1,169.27 per share and was up 54.97% this year.

Written by Leah Alger

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Edited from source by Ella Donaldson

Source:
Seatrade Maritime News

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