Ars Technica to host talk on drone strikes and data centers

In short: Ars Technica will livestream a discussion on November 17 about drone and missile attacks on data centers and the risk to cloud services.

What happened

Ars Technica reporter Jeremy Hsu is hosting a live conversation on Tuesday, November 17 at 1 pm Eastern Time. The topic is how drone and missile strikes are damaging data centers and disrupting online services.

Data centers are large buildings full of computers that run apps and store data for many companies. Many of these services are delivered through “the cloud,” which is a simple way to say your photos, messages, and work files live on someone else’s computers, not just on your own device.

Hsu’s guest will be Joseph Jarnecki, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a UK defense and security think tank. Ars says recent strikes in Eastern Europe and the Middle East have disrupted cloud services for millions of people, and in some cases permanently deleted data from some Amazon Web Services customers.

The livestream will cover why data centers have become military targets, whether they can be realistically defended, and how cloud services can be made more resilient during war. Viewers will be able to watch on YouTube, and Ars plans to take a few audience questions.

Why it matters

For most people, the cloud feels like a utility, like electricity or running water. This news is a reminder that cloud services depend on physical places, and those places can be damaged. When a data center goes down, everyday services can break, from business software to photo backups, and sometimes data may not come back.

Source: Arstechnica