HighNet is a leading provider of business voice and data solutions, across the United Kingdom, that are sold through a network of Channel Partners. HighNet operates a high-bandwidth, high-availability, voice-centric network to ensure that business customers can maximize the potential of cloud services and low latency internet access. With 25 years’ experience in telecoms, they are experts in hosted telephony, unified communications, mobile communications, and data connectivity. HighNet’s customers range from small through to national and international enterprises and organizations.
Towards the end of 2016, HighNet had a growing awareness of the threat from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks; they hadn’t been attacked, but they knew that a large-scale attack on one of their customers could overwhelm their IP transit connections and have a material effect on hundreds or thousands of other customers across their network. Their only DDoS defense at the time was monitoring and alerting on their network traffic levels and then relying on their upstream providers to blackhole suspicious traffic. The company grew to realize that this blunt instrument approach, which results in good traffic also being blackholed, along with the bad traffic, was increasingly unacceptable. HighNet understood that DDoS attacks were becoming more common and sophisticated, requiring a DDoS mitigation defense that was faster, more accurate, and would allow good traffic to flow normally while surgically blocking only the DDoS traffic.
After considering various DDoS mitigation options, HighNet selected the Corero SmartWall® Threat Defense System (TDS). They ruled out some solutions for technical reasons, and others because they required significant upfront investment in hardware, software, maintenance, and professional services to design and deliver the deployment. “Corero’s pay-as-you-go commercial model was spot-on, a perfect fit for us, because we didn’t have to make a large upfront investment to deploy it on our network,” said David Alldritt, HighNet’s Technology and Innovation Director. That business model has allowed HighNet to fund their investment by productizing their DDoS protection and offering it as-a-service, which rapidly delivered a positive effect on their bottom-line results.
HighNet does give customers the chance to opt-out of the protection service, but has found that not many have chosen to do so. Some did opt-out initially and were later hit by DDoS attacks, so they quickly opted back in to the DDoS protection service. The Corero SmartWall TDS is deployed in-line, at the perimeter of its network. “Certainly, the always-on protection on our network edge, rather than being on someone else’s cloud is an important design feature for our network architecture,” says Alldritt. “Everywhere that our network touches the public Internet we have Corero protecting that edge, we don’t need any manual intervention, we don’t have to re-route traffic, so we’re maximizing our security and operational effectiveness. That architectural piece makes the SmartWall deployment the smart choice for us.” Output from the Corero solution into the multi-tenant SmartWall Service Portal, helps HighNet’s customers get the information they need about the defense of their environment. “That factor was spot on, a great fit for us,” said Alldritt, “We’ve been doing a lot to try to improve our business systems to reduce the human intervention and errors, which had been incurring significant costs for us”.
By using the Corero platform we are able to quantify the level of protection our customers are receiving and integrate that with our billing platform and CRM system, which is cost effective, efficient and done without error.” Alldritt said, “After having the solution in place for almost three years, when it came time to upgrade, we had absolutely no reason to shop around for an alternative, because we are delighted with the way the solution works. Plus, Corero made the hardware upgrade so flexible and easy for us.”
Since implementing Corero’s SmartWall TDS, HighNet has seen regular — and sometimes repeat — attacks on some of their customers that are quite large in volume, and a few that were of significant duration. “All attacks have been mitigated, so they are happy customers,” said Alldritt. “The Corero SmartWall has handled every DDoS attack that has been thrown at us, so we haven’t had to explore any gaps.”
Providers around the globe, like HighNet, must protect against the rising number of DDoS attacks. The world today depends on Internet availability; with millions of individuals and businesses relying upon it. DDoS attacks continue to threaten this availability, so providers must take very seriously the decisions they make in terms of which DDoS protection solution they implement.
Corero Network Security is a global leader in real-time, high-performance, automatic DDoS defense solutions. Corero’s industry leading SmartWall and SecureWatch technology protects on-premise, cloud, virtual and hybrid environments with a scalable solution that delivers a more cost-effective economic model than ever before.For more on Corero’s flexible deployment models, click here. If you’d like to learn more, please contact us.