Description :
It is slightly alarming to note but is an unfortunate truth that cyber-attacks have taken on many forms and have become pretty cost-effective as well, at least for the attackers.
Nowhere this is more evident than in the field of distributed denial of service attacks. These, so called DDoS attacks have come to the fore lately because of their availability and potential for destruction. Today they are being unleashed against all kinds of targets including:
• Government organizations
• Financial sector
• Individuals
• Banks of national importance
• Defense websites and so on
As a result, more and more organizations are looking at the various ways in which they can deploy the best in class DDoS protection services. Before looking for the ideal service provider when it comes to such protection services, there are a few things that you can keep in mind.
The price of DDoS attack
Last year, the Ponemon Institute brought out a report that revealed that around 65% of the respondents had dealt with some form of a DDoS attack. Earlier this year, yet another document called Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report stated that 94% of the respondents need to deal with such attacks on a regular basis. This is an alarmingly large percentage. And this fact alone should be reason enough for you to seek DDoS protection.
If you fail to deploy such protection for your network then you are likely to face consequences such as:
• Going off the grid for a prolonged period of time
• Loss of customers, revenue productivity
• Disruption of communications and networking
The price of DDoS protection
Ideally, DDoS protection should be able to take care of your application layer protection (also known as Layer 7) and or your network layer (Layer 3). Considering that DDoS attacks can take place at mammoth scales and can target both the network and application layers, it is important to deploy protection for the same as well. Ideally, the mitigation also needs to take place outside of your core network, as the cure can be almost as bad as the disease itself.
Important Factors: Speed and Scalability
There are different types of DDoS attacks but they all have one common goal – depletion of resources, CPU, memory and bandwidth. Traditionally, to mitigate such attacks, an organization would invest in an upkeep of additional resources – specifically more servers or stronger machines. However, DDoS attacks are getting bigger all the time and when they go beyond the resource limit, the website or network are still brought down. This is why it’s so important to invest in flexible DDoS protection that can scale up to meet and deflect attacks that can “morph” on-call to go beyond the pre-acquired bandwidth.
Obviously, on-premises and hardware based solutions will not offer such flexibility, as they require more setup time and may depend upon physical delivery. This is why many modern day providers are gravitating towards cloud based anti DDoS solutions that can be easily implemented and can scale up on demand, providing a cost-effective mitigation option even against the largest attacks.
Who should seek DDoS protection?
If you have an online presence of any kind then you should seek DDoS protection. This becomes even more important if you are dealing with confidential data, personal information of a large number of clients, e-commerce operations and even if you use cloud computing for your applications.
Simply put, whether you are a small business or an enterprise, it is important to consider employing DDoS protection.
*by andreascy*
