The big vendors give you peace of mind when it comes to the services they offer. However the big vendors are big targets for threat actors.
Recently Microsoft Azure, OneDrive and Outlook portals have been suffering outages and service degradation – Microsoft’s investigation revealed they were under a sustained distributed denial of service attack (DDoS).
Microsoft confirms Azure, Outlook outages caused by DDoS attacks (bleepingcomputer.com)
The attacks were at the application level (layer 7 in network speak) where the threat actor sends so many requests to the service that the servers cannot cope with the spike in demand.
You cannot take many steps in mitigating this type of interruption to a service you use – keep some local copies of essential information – but that has other security issues. However with the big vendors their infrastructure is extensive and one of the steps Microsoft took for it’s customers was to load balance the attack across it’s systems in an attempt to blunt the attack.
Clive Catton MSc (Cyber Security) – by-line and other articles
