Cybersecurity is a growing agenda item for organizations across public and private sectors, which is not surprising, given that cybercrime surged in 2020, and is likely to increase again in 2021, according to a report by Cybersecurity Ventures. In board rooms across the globe, executives constantly weigh the risks to critical data and business continuity versus investing more time and resources in cybersecurity. We understand that there are numerous types of cybersecurity threats, and it can be costly in terms of time, money, and personnel to protect against all of them. Balancing budgets and ensuring business resiliency, in the face of cyber threats, is seldom a simple endeavor.
If your organization is undecided whether to invest in protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, for example, consider 1) the potential cost of downtime for your business (loss of revenue, brand reputation, customer loyalty, etc.) and 2) the potential cost savings for your IT security department. Depending on your business model and industry sector, your IT security team may already be extremely busy responding to cybersecurity incidents such as DDoS attacks. That is particularly true for Internet Service Providers and Hosting Providers because they serve as the gateway to the Internet for many organizations and must protect all those customers from collateral damage when any one of them is victimized by a DDoS attack.
The Benefits of Automated Defense Solutions
What happens when you implement a cybersecurity solution that limits your exposure to a common cyberthreat? You not only minimize your exposure to a particular threat; you also reduce customer support costs, improve customer satisfaction, and enable your IT security staff to focus on other tasks.
With any cybersecurity threat, it is crucial to stop it as early as possible. Human security analysis is prone to observational error and, even without such errors, it is often impossible for humans to react quickly enough to incoming threats, before damage is done. This certainly holds true in the case of DDoS, because the attacks themselves are often multi-vector, automated, and change rapidly to evade detection and mitigation. Manual DDoS mitigation is also ineffective because the vast majority of DDoS attacks are short, sub-saturating, and designed to evade legacy protection.
The key benefit of the latest generation of DDoS protection solutions is that they deliver automated, real-time, always-on mitigation, that your IT staff can “set and forget.” That means you don’t have to dedicate staff to handling DDoS attacks; you can either reduce your staffing costs or re-assign those staff to other value-add responsibilities.
In summary, organizations that are doing cost-benefit analysis of various cybersecurity needs and solutions, should consider not only the probability that they may fall victim to a particular type of cyberattack, but also the true costs of implementing an ineffective solution, or none. To learn how Corero customers have benefitted from their DDoS mitigation implementations, and saved substantial time and money by doing so, review our case studies.