Iranian strikes on Amazon data centers highlights industry’s vulnerability to physical disasters

LONDON (AP) — Damage to three Amazon Web Services facilities in the Middle East Iranian drone attacks It highlights the rapid growth of data centers in the region as well as the sector’s vulnerability to conflict.

Two data centers in the United Arab Emirates were “directly hit” and another facility in Bahrain was damaged by a drone that landed nearby, the company’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, said in a statement late Monday.

“These attacks caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” AWS said in an update on its online dashboard.

Recovery efforts at UAE data centers were making progress, it said late Tuesday.

Different pre- AWS blackouts These attacks, which involved physical damage involving software that caused widespread global outages, appear to have resulted in only a local, limited outage.

Amazon Web Services hosts many of the world’s most used online services, providing behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure to many government agencies, universities, and businesses.

The company advised customers using servers in the Middle East to switch to other regions and divert online traffic away from the UAE and Bahrain.

“Amazon has generally structured its services so that the loss of a single data center is relatively insignificant to its operations,” said Mike Chapple, an IT professor at the University of Notre Dame Mendoza School of Business.

He said other data centers in the same area can take over, and this often happens seamlessly every day to balance workloads.

“However, the loss of multiple data centers within an availability zone can cause serious problems as things can get to the point where there is not enough capacity left to handle the entire job.”

Amazon generally does not disclose the exact number of data centers it operates worldwide.

It says data centers alone are concentrated in 39 geographic areas; In the Middle East, these three regions include the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Israel.

Each AWS region is divided into at least three data center availability zones; each region is isolated and physically separated by a “significant distance”, but they are all within 100 kilometers (60 mi) of each other and connected by “ultra-low latency networks” that reduce the time delay for data transmission.

AWS says its data centers have backup water, power, telecom and internet connections “so we can maintain uninterrupted operations in case of emergency.”

They also have physical security, but these measures, including guards, fences, video surveillance and alarm systems, are designed to keep intruders out rather than defend against missile attacks.

Chapple said the attacks are a reminder that cloud computing is not “magical” and “still requires physical facilities in the field that are vulnerable to all kinds of disaster scenarios.”

He added that data centers operated by AWS and other operators are huge facilities that are difficult to store.

“Organizations using the services of any cloud provider in the Middle East should immediately take steps to shift their computing systems to other regions,” Chapple said.