The Cloud and Denial of Services

I am not a huge fan of services in the cloud, as discussed here towards the end of the presentation. Instead, I much prefer to have my services and data securely running and stored behind a firewall in my own home network readily accessible over a secure connection over the Internet from my wireless devices.

In the past weeks, lots of denial of service attacks have been launched on Twitter and some mashups and front-ends were blocked for days because they could not have been distinguished from the DoS attack. In effect, no Twitter service for me when I wanted to use it a number of times.

These incidents made me think about my views on connected home services again. Dabr, the Twitter front-end I use on my mobile device can also be installed on a different server, e.g. at home, and would thus probably not have been an indirect victim of the DoS attack. Another thought was what would happen, if in the future a very popular web based service would be the target of a DoS and you wouldn't be able to use your critical applications for days. Not from home and not from the mobile either. Not a nice thought.

Sure, it's possible to launch a DoS attack on connected home services, too but it's unlikely that anyone would go through all the pain and expense just to make life difficult for one person.

I guess that, too speaks for distribution of private services rather than concentration in the cloud.