One of the hacker’s best weapons is the good old distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The idea is simple: just flood your victims with unwanted traffic until their computers come to a screeching halt. Business stops, data is lost, and you and your pals can pat yourselves on your sniveling little backs.
MSP tw teleccom, inc. (yes, they prefer all lower-case, and they like to bold face their name, something this editor won’t let them do here) says it has a way to keep on truckin’ even in the midst of a DDoS attack. And the answer comes as a service so the IT staff has to do next to nothing for it all to work.
The company says you can wash away the pain with DDoS scrubbing. During an attack, bad traffic is scrubbed out while good data is allowed right in. This way the connections are not flooded and your connectivity and ability to compute survive.
"Our DDoS Scrubbing service offers granular traffic management, which protects customer network resources so they can continue to operate at high levels of quality without impeding network performance," said Trent Pham, director of security product portfolio for tw telecom.
One Current Analysis analyst believes in the concept. "Resilience against DoS attacks is becoming more important to a larger cross section of organizations," said Amy DeCarlo, principal analyst for security and data center services at Current Analysis. "tw telecom's service is designed to maintain stability of a customer's network without disrupting their current traffic. This gives tw telecom customers integral protection against such threats."
One customer had been crippled by these DDoS. Now with the ability to scrub, those worries are largely over, according iParadigms, which provides online grading for colleges. "We operate completely online, so being connected to the Internet is critical to our business," said Will Lowe, vice president of IT operations for iParadigms. "We experienced a denial of service attack against our site, which crippled our ability to conduct business. tw telecom immediately stepped in and provided us with DDoS Scrubbing, which allowed us to recover quickly from these attacks, continue to operate online and protect us against further DoS attacks."
The hard work of scrubbing and inspecting traffic happens on the tw network, and attacks are tackled away from the customer’s corporate network, which won’t even always know this work is taking place.
"tw telecom inspects and filters a DoS attack at the edge of its network, giving it the ability to fight an attack before it enters the network. The service is easy to understand, simple to use and provides rapid response times to notify customers of a potential attack and begin protection once an attack has occurred," said Pham.
Managed Security Breaking Out
The market for managed security services hit a healthy $13 billion last year, at least according to Infonetics Research as its “Cloud and CPE Managed Security” report.
“Buyers are moving to managed security services to deal with increased attack volume and complexity, manage security product sprawl, deliver consistent security for a distributed workforce and device population, and provide security for cloud infrastructure,” said Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for security at Infonetics Research. “Manufacturers and service providers are developing more mature offerings to build out and deliver managed security to customers, and the net result is the market continues to enjoy healthy overall growth, with particularly strong growth for cloud-based services.”
Last year the managed security market worldwide grew 12 percent to reach its $13 billion mark. Most of that money comes from CPE, but in four years CPE will represent less than half of total revenue.
The cloud is where it is going to be at, the researchers said. “Infonetics forecasts sales of cloud-based security services to grow 69 percent over the next five years. “Other security services, of which hosted DDoS services are a major and growing contributor, are anticipated to comprise over 20 percent of cloud-based security service revenue by 2017,” the report states.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
