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Is your Datacenter protected against DDoS-attack downtime?

Many companies have migrated some or all of their datacenter infrastructure to the cloud. From an efficiency and scalability stance, moving business or customer data to the cloud can make life easier. However, it can also expose your data because not all cloud providers have adequate cybersecurity defenses. Additionally, when it comes to DDoS attacks, cybercriminals may target one customer of a public cloud, putting other customers of the same provider at significant risk of suffering from collateral damage. Thus, moving your data up to the cloud can increase your attack surface, as well as risks to business continuity. Depending on your business model, even if your cloud provider asserts that it has robust protection against various forms of cyber attack, consider that it may not be “good enough” for your business needs, in which case you may need to consider your alternatives.

Keeping your company’s data and hardware on-premises offers more control, but of course, responsibility goes hand-in-hand with that control. Private cloud datacenters, like other network assets, face many cyber threats. In light of the ongoing and increasing prevalence of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, organizations that have their own on-premises datacenters should make sure they have appropriate DDoS protection in place, to prevent impact to business continuity and the associated reputational and financial damage that is often incurred.

Choosing the appropriate form of DDoS protection can be confusing and time-consuming. The “right” solution depends not only on your budget and preference for CAPEX or OPEX, but also on your business model, risk appetite, the topology of your IT environment, and the ability to keep ahead of the ever-evolving threat landscape. Managing DDoS manually, in-house, isn’t an  effective solution, since the sophisticated nature of today’s attacks (automated, multi-vector, changeable) means security analysts cannot detect or react fast enough to them. One increasingly favorable option, is to outsource the DDoS protection to your company’s hosting provider or Internet Service Provider, who may include it as a value-added service or offer it for an additional fee.

Other implementation options include the following:

  • On-premises Appliances. While not all appliances are equal, they are intended to block any DDoS attack traffic that makes its way down your Internet connections. Caveat: To maintain business continuity in rarer cases when the total attack size is larger than your Internet bandwidth, an on-premises solution typically needs to be augmented with cloud protection.
  • Out-of-band, on-demand Cloud Scrubbing Service. This approach is suited to handling even the largest volumetric attacks. However, the out-of-band nature of this approach introduces delays to the mitigation, which means the full impact of each attack is felt for a significant period of time, often measured in minutes, before it is blocked. Given that the vast majority of DDoS attacks are under 10Gbps, and short in duration, most organizations do not benefit greatly from on-demand cloud-mitigation, as attacks have typically already caused their damage before being blocked.
  • A Hybrid Combination. For organizations where business continuity is critical, a hybrid approach is best. On-premises protection ensures each attack is blocked with a speed and accuracy that means no impact is felt. And cloud protection is on standby, in case any attack is at risk of exceeding the available bandwidth, so it can be blocked upstream and avoid Internet links becoming saturated.
Features to Look For

All options considered, it is vital to ensure that your company has always-on, automated, real-time protection, because even short-duration DDoS attacks can wreak havoc for online transactions or other business applications; any system downtime is the enemy of brand reputation, customer loyalty and the bottom line. Plus, automation frees up time for your IT and security teams to focus on other threats or business-enabling projects. And, solutions that offer comprehensive visibility into any DDoS traffic hitting their servers, provides security analysts with a forensic understanding of the nature of any attacks that are attempted.

For more information about Corero implementation options, please download the Corero DDoS Solutions Brief.

For over a decade, Corero has been providing state-of-the-art, highly-effective, real-time automatic DDoS protection solutions for enterprise, hosting and service provider customers around the world. Our SmartWall® DDoS mitigation solutions protect on-premise, cloud, virtual and hybrid environments. For more on Corero’s diverse deployment models, click here. If you’d like to learn more, please contact us.