Tony is the main IT staff member for a small company and has migrated his company’s infrastructure from an on-site data center to cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider. Recently he has been receiving reports that his website is slow to respond and that it is inaccessible at times. Tony thinks that attackers may be conducting a denial-of-service attack against his company. What can Tony do to identify if he is suffering from a denial-of-service (DoS) attack against his cloud hosting environment?

Tony’s best option is to check the anti-denial-of-service and other security tools that his cloud hosting provider provides and to make appropriate use of them. The major infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers have a variety of security tools that can help both detect and prevent DoS attacks from taking down sites that are hosted in their infrastructure. Calling the cloud service provider’s ISP will not work because the ISP works with the cloud provider, not with Tony! It is possible the cloud service provider might be able to help Tony, but they are most likely to instruct him to use the existing tools that they already provide.