DDoS-protection crisis looms as attacks grow

Every year, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks break records for frequency, size, and sophistication, making it imperative that enterprises adopt powerful mitigation measures. To be effective, those measures require network and processing capacity that can handle the flood of requests DDoS attacks generate in their quest to overwhelm corporate servers. 

Defense mechanisms need to incorporate detection technology that can quickly distinguish attacks from legitimate, normal spikes in incoming business traffic. And they need to generate reports on DDoS incidents to help businesses plan future security enhancements and to provide data that supports audit and compliance requirements.

Given the cost of tools and staffing to meet all these needs, enterprises cannot act alone. Their best strategy is to enlist dedicated DDoS services that unburden corporate security teams from assembling in-house specialized talent and technology to design, install, monitor and maintain the necessary mitigation infrastructure on site. Such services can be both effective and painless to adopt. 

Addressing the DDoS problem

While DDoS attacks certainly worry CIOs, CTOs and CSOs, they should also be of concern to CFOs and CEOs because of the well-known havoc they can wreak on revenues, productivity, and reputation.

Mitigating DDoS attacks requires the ability to process incoming attack volume and sort harmful traffic from legitimate. Because the cost of doing so is just too large for enterprises to bear, they must find trusted service partners with the scale and expertise to handle it for them.

These partners monitor inbound traffic and redirect any suspicious activity to scrubbing centers that find the suspect traffic and drop it. Clean traffic gets routed to customer networks. And all that must happen fast, to avoid intrusive delays that disrupt end users. The mitigation partner needs to have the network capacity and processing power to automatically respond to the attacks it detects — before any damage is done, and no matter the scale of the attack. 

Ideally, the service can accomplish all this with little or no additional hardware at corporate sites, while complementing in-house security measures already in place. 

Optimum offers a DDoS solution

One such solution is Managed DDoS Protection offered by Optimum, which is rolled into Optimum Business Internet service. Within a minute of customer-bound traffic showing anomalies that indicate a DDoS attack, all traffic headed to that IP address is off-ramped to Optimum’s scrubbing centers. When it’s been sandboxed and sorted, malicious traffic is dumped and good traffic is routed to the customer, with that extra hop adding just 2ms of latency.

Customers go about business as usual, with no knowledge the attack even occurred until they receive an incident report from Optimum detailing the type, size, and duration of the attack — information that can support audit and compliance requirements. The whole process requires no additional hardware, circuits or tunneling configurations. 

This type of DDoS protection, especially when integrated with other internet services, can mitigate the threat of downtime without additional investment in staff or hardware. It’s a form of protection that’s too good to ignore. 

Learn more about how Optimum can protect you from DDoS attacks. Visit our Business Secure Internet page.