Amazon & Alibaba are getting you comfortable with Insecure Clouds
It’s like Amazon and Alibaba woke up one day and said “I think we’re going to start Cloud Computing”.
To give you some background here. Alibaba was founded by entrepreneur Jack Ma, and worked with the Chinese government to create a credit rating system that rates you based on the quality of your purchases, to paying on time. But it also hits your credit if you have friends or family who have lower credit ratings, and if you purchase cheaper goods. And like the article linked shows, they are barring ‘low rated people from using the bus’. Thus creating a system to publicly humiliate people for their purchases and for being poor. And yet, people still host with Alibaba- a massive public cloud company and yet utterly unsafe and insecure.
Amazon made a private ‘secret’ cloud and landed the CIA contract with AWS. Yes you’re sharing that cloud space with the CIA- what do you think is going to happen here? It’s the best decision the CIA made and you’ll find tons of articles glorifying how this AWS is disruptive to the industry and changes everything….Yes, it’s disruptive because it’s just another thing that takes away your control and gives it to a company that has a CIA connection. I see large scale corporations rushing to AWS like VMWare and I’m baffled because someone, at least ONE smart IT guy should know- this isn’t smart, this is a waste of resources, time and in the end is going to help reduce jobs for more IT professionals and reduce security- GREATLY. And on top of this, Amazon’s AWS is opensource that they’re making billions off of – which then begs the question about ethics surrounding a company that is used to giving backdoor access to spy agencies.
Basically it’s like the Walmart of the IT world. Before Walmart came in there were hundreds of small businesses, and after Walmart, all those businesses shut down and those small business owners now work for Walmart (except Walmart in this case, is freely handing out your data to the CIA)….I hope that made sense.
As we know, if you’re in a 5 eyes nation, you’re up for data collection without your knowledge or consent. If you have customer data who do you think is mining that data for government or 3rd party agencies? You’re in a public cloud, not a private one, and you’re ‘sharing’ your space with hundreds of other people/businesses and paying for it. Anyone of those gets hacked, you are pretty much going to get hacked too.
To be fair, that’s the law, Amazon has no choice but to comply. But then why are you allowing them to get you comfortable with all these data and privacy breaches? Why are you AWS’ing when there are so many other better services out there, that won’t cost you thousands to learn or hire to run for you? And the last question is, what does this say about your company- the one who didn’t seem to care about their clients data enough?
I will be making a series of different posts on Alibaba and Amazon and the state of insecure and how it’s become a trend to worry about cybersecurity and privacy but actually do nothing about it.
Until then,
Cheers,
A.Yasir
