As an IT professional, your customers are your fellow employees, above and below, up, down and across the organization hierarchy. The last thing you want, or need, is for an unplanned event or system downtime, because your internal customers increasingly have zero tolerance for any amount of downtime, especially if your business depends on its Internet connectivity for: your website, essential business applications and most critical of all, if your product is a service offered over the Internet.
Because IT systems are complex and commonly distributed across the cloud, on-premises servers, and remote workspaces, every organization is at an increasingly high risk of becoming the victim of a cyberattack. In today’s Internet first world, IT departments must have disaster recovery plans in place to restore systems, applications, services and data as quickly and efficiently as possible. Of course, the best disaster plan is to avoid it in the first place. A key component of this is having strong cybersecurity defenses to protect against the growing number of cyberattacks
As a recent CISO magazine article points out, sometimes the problem lies beyond your control, such as when a critical SaaS application that your organization relies on to conduct business is unavailable. Remember when a certain, commonly used, business collaboration tool was hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack back in 2017? The resulting outage “only” lasted an hour but that’s a very long time in business, relatively speaking. It affected (and annoyed) thousands of users of the collaboration tool because it knocked the service completely offline for many of them and slowed it down for many others. While you cannot control the uptime of your SaaS applications, you can safeguard your own network.
Downtime is costly; much more than prevention. Depending on the size of your organization, those costs easily add up to several thousands of dollars per minute, or more, and can end up costing millions of dollars, along with the ongoing impact from upsetting your customers. If your organization is assessing the costs of a potential attack, you should also factor in potential regulatory fines, reimbursements due to service level agreement violations, legal liability, lost revenue, damage to brand reputation, lost employee productivity, and any in-house or outsourced labor that is required to get systems back online. If you outsource some or all of your cybersecurity resources to a Managed Security Service Provider you must recognize that although they are experts in disaster recovery, they can’t automatically jump in to save your organization from every type of attack.
For example, when it comes to DDoS attacks you cannot afford to be reactive, you must be proactive. If you don’t have a DDoS protection solution in place before you are under a DDoS attack, it can take several hours to get a mitigation system in place. In terms of the type of solution you should implement, it pays to have always-on, automated, real-time DDoS mitigation. It is not sufficient to rely on security analysts who are manually observing traffic, to spot potential DDoS traffic, because most attacks are short and sub-saturating, easily bypassing human detection and manual intervention. Even if your security analysts do notice an attack, it often takes more than 10 minutes before a cloud scrubbing service commences mitigation. During those precious minutes, your network is being degraded, if not knocked offline completely, which can be more than an uptime problem; as, while you’re distracted by the DDoS attack, the attackers might also be installing malware or stealing data. The only way to ensure complete protection is by investing in an always-on, real-time DDoS mitigation solution.