As another ISP suffers another distributed denial of service attack, you have to ask yourself why a company would rush off all guns blazing into the cloud.

With the cost of acquiring the services of thousands of drones ever decreasing, it’s getting cheaper to disrupt your competitors during key times such as new product launches. For example, it wouldn’t be unfeasible to ‘organise’ a distributed denial of service attack that takes out your competitors website and mail servers for several days. Coupled with a new product version release of your own could constitute a severe blow to your competitors bottom line and credibility.

I’m not suggesting we all run from our desks, arms flailing, pulling at our hair, screaming “The russians are coming” (which coincidentally would make for a kick ass Youtube channel). I’m hoping I suppose, that you do your due diligence when considering to move key business processes into ‘the cloud’. Do some research on how you can make your systems redundant, backup, backup and backup some more, just because your systems are in the cloud doesn’t mean that your provider should be responsible for your data.

Take a minute today to contemplate where your business would be if your online email provider such as GMail, Office 365 or even Hotmail vaporised (or more realistically, decided to revoke your account for some uncontrollable breach of their terms of service). No, seriously, consider it just for the lulz.. Imagine that as of 2pm today, your whole email history just vaporised. Scary thought eh?

Now imagine if your shiny new online accounting system happened to vaporise at the same time.. You’d always have your cloud computing laptop left I suppose, and seeing as that doesn’t save any data locally it’d be a whole lot lighter to carry to your next job interview.