Iran drone strikes cause permanent data loss in Middle East

 Companies all over the world rely on cloud storage to keep their data safe long term, but just because something is in the cloud doesn't mean it's necessarily safe forever.

Amazon AWS customers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have permanently lost data following multiple waves of Iranian strikes, which began in March of this year, on several data centers. The strikes, which targeted multiple Gulf states, were carried out in retaliation for American and Israeli strikes on Iran.

Bahrain was more severely impacted than the UAE. Amazon was unable to fully restore access in all three of Bahrain's availability zones—clusters of data centers built to serve a specific area—compared to just one zone, mec1-az2, in the UAE.

"After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this Region," read the UAE service update, first reported by Reuters.

Amazon says it had been encouraging customers to migrate their data as soon as attacks started, adding that "most" did so and have been able to "re-establish their operations in other Regions by restoring backups or copying data that remained accessible."

Billing operations have been suspended in both countries since the attacks started roughly six months ago.

Keeping important data far away from any warzones may increasingly become an important consideration. Data centers are becoming targets of military strikes, just like other parts of essential infrastructure. Matt McCrann, former executive at drone defense company DroneShield, told Forbes in April that data centers are now "secondary targets right after obvious military sites."

Operating in active warzones is also a risk for data center operators. Forbes reports that AWS has so far paid out $150 million in credits to customers in the Middle East as a result of the attacks. This type of attack is also prevalent in other ongoing conflicts. Russia claims it struck the De Novo data center, one of Ukraine's largest, in the capital of Kyiv earlier this week.