Republished from Corero DDoS Blog:
It’s well known in the industry that DDoS attacks are becoming more frequent and increasingly debilitating, turning DDoS mitigation into a mission critical initiative. From the largest of carriers to small and mid-level enterprises, more and more Internet connected businesses are becoming a target of DDoS attacks. What was once a problem that only a select few dealt with is now becoming a regularly occurring burden faced by network operators.
In my daily engagements with various customers of all shapes and sizes, it’s truly interesting to see how the approach to DDoS mitigation is changing. Much of this is the result of DDoS mitigation services shifting from a “nice to have” technology to a “must-have”, essential in order to maintain business continuity and availability.
When I built DDoS mitigation and detection services for Verizon back in 2004, the intent was to offer value-add revenue producing services to offer subscribers, in an effort to build out our security offerings. For many years, this concept was one that pretty much every provider I worked with was looking into; build a service with the intent of generating new revenue opportunity from customers when traditional avenues such as simple connectivity and bandwidth offerings were contracting.
However, in the past several months, as I interact with large scale carriers to data center hosting providers, I am seeing a common thread starting to emerge – that is, attracting new customers and retaining existing ones is becoming more difficult in the absence of differentiated value. Compounding this issue is that the customers are starting to expect some of these services as part of their connectivity fees. What I’m seeing is more and more providers investigating the option of offering DDoS mitigation services to their customers as a virtue of being connected to them, in an effort to attract them away from other providers who have limited service offerings and capabilities.
Could it be that DDoS mitigation services become a standard offering on a provider’s network? Is it feasible that at some point in the future DDoS mitigation will become an inherent capability provided by the service providers?
In order for this approach to become a reality, the economics of the game have to change. Inserting DDoS mitigation elements into the network need to be reasonably inexpensive in order for carriers and hosting providers to justify the cost. The technology also needs to be simple and as close to automatic as possible, as an inherent service offering will not justify the huge expense and uplift of having a team of operations personnel managing the service. Attacks need to be mitigated dynamically and quickly and without the need for manual intervention or the requirement to have to pick up a phone to get assistance. And lastly, whatever mechanisms are in place need to ensure a “do no harm” approach and that there is no collateral damage to good traffic.
At Corero, we believe that we are doing just that; changing not only the economics of the game, but also by fundamentally looking at the problem is a different way. Corero enables real-time, algorithmic identification of network anomalies and subsequent mitigation of the attack traffic, eliminating the DDoS challenge before attacks transit the network and ultimately impact downstream customers.
This concept is realized through, dynamic mitigation bandwidth licensing – a new economic model which represents the use of high scalable DDoS mitigation technology. The ability to modernize DDoS protection, specifically taking advantage of always-on DDoS mitigation through emerging and proven deployment models; such as dedicated in-line deployment of appliance based DDoS mitigation at the peering and transit points is becoming a more common practice with the help of Corero Network Security.