Drone strikes on Middle East data centers highlight their importance — and vulnerabilities

Amazon Web Services has confirmed several of its data centers in the Middle East have been damaged by drone attacks, presumably launched by Iran or its proxy. Two facilities in the UAE were hit directly and one in Bahrain was damaged by a nearby strike.

The outage disrupted service on several consumer apps in the region, including banking and payment apps. It’s also raised broader concerns about the security of data centers, now the backbone of the internet and the artificial intelligence economy.

The computing power in data centers is basically the new oil, said analyst Dan Ives at Wedbush. It’s the essential resource that so much of our digital economy runs on, so it was only a matter of time until this critical infrastructure was targeted — like oil pipelines have been in war.

“They have to adjust to the new realities where they’re going to have to make sure that they protect their assets both abroad as well as in the U.S.,” he said.

The industry has been focused on the threat of cyber attacks, said Justin Sherman at Global Cyber Strategies.

“China, Russia, Iran, others … trying to hack into cloud systems, data centers, to steal data, disrupt training,” he said.

Most of the cloud is run by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, which Sherman says are well-resourced to defend against hacks. But the average commercial facility isn’t equipped to deal with physical threats like drones, said Matt Pearl at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“It’s just not hardened in the same way that military infrastructure is, even though in many cases the military relies on it,” he said.

And some of the same qualities that make data centers unpopular neighbors also make them easy targets.

“These data centers are becoming very large physically. They’re above ground, you know, it’s all visible,” Pearl said.

He said even consumer drones can do a lot of damage — the kind that takes more than some lines of code to repair.