Just under a half of respondents felt reasonably or well prepared for a security incident, with 15 per cent indicating that they having no plans or resources in place.
Data Centres are a High-Volume, High-Impact Targets
Over one third of data centre operators saw DDoS attacks which exhausted their Internet bandwidth.
This underscores just how critical of an issue this continues to be for data centre operators, because downtime means not just lost business, but the collateral damage extended to customers operating business critical infrastructure in the cloud.
Revenue loss due to DDoS is up sharply and 44 per cent of data centre respondents experienced revenue losses due to DDoS.
Defending Organisations from the DDoS Threat
Everything we have seen over the past year re-affirms layered DDoS protection as the best way to defend organisations from the DDoS threat.
Network perimeter defences provide proactive protection from stealthy application-layer attacks (and in fact all kinds of attacks), but they need to be coupled with a cloud or service provider based DDoS protection service to deal with higher magnitude (Volumetric) attacks which simply saturate Internet connectivity.
The security teams across a broad spread of organisations are becoming increasingly aware of the need for these layered DDoS defence solutions, but they have to compete (from a budget perspective) with other business priorities.
So, how does the CIO compete for this investment in the boardroom? Well, the key is to compare the financial implications of a prolonged Internet service outage with the cost of appropriate defences.
Fundamentally, it’s imperative for CIOs and CISOs to be able to put a monetary value on the cost of an attack when building a case for investment into security products and processes.
The starting point is to estimate the overall impact a DDoS attack is likely to have from a revenue, operational overhead and reputational perspective.
These are the elements that can influence the overall cost of a DDoS attack and vary according to the nature of the business in question.
Modelling all of these costs is a good way to determine the benefits of DDoS protection, since effective DDoS security can help reduce these costs by 90 per cent or more in the event of an attack.
With DDoS attacks continuing to grow in size, frequency and complexity – and our ever-increasing reliance on the Internet for day-to-day business continuity - putting the most appropriate defences in place is key.
The best solutions and services ensure your business is protected from the DDoS threat.
By Nick Race, New Zealand Country Manager at Arbor Networks
