In today’s fast-paced and quickly changing business environment companies rely heavily on the performance and efficiency provided by data centers. The digital transformation boom still lasts, and more and more businesses – independent of size – depend on the quality of connectivity, network options, and security offered by data center services. These are changing times for data centers too, and providers are doing everything to expand and meet the needs of their clients. The ever-increasing volumes of data, however, bring the challenges of cybercrime, and better protection against threats like DDoS attacks is becoming non-negotiable. Data centers and infrastructure providers are seeing rapid evolution, and the topic of data center and DDoS mitigation is as prevalent as it gets.
In today’s blog post, we’re going to look at recent cyber threat trends and explore the newest security trends among colocation providers. We will explore why data center and DDoS mitigation are such important topics today. Stay for the read!
Crunching the Numbers
Back in 2017, The Economist boldly pronounced, “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.” Seven years later, this declaration continues to hold true. In March 2021, a TechCrunch headline asserted, “Data is the world’s most valuable (and vulnerable) resource.” Today, a staggering 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated daily — an equivalent of 1.7 MB of data created per second by every person on the planet. With the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, the amount of data produced added up to a staggering average of 120 zettabytes in 2023 and is estimated to reach 147 zettabytes in 2024, according to Statista.
For data centers, these statistics can mean that business is booming, especially taking into consideration that the data center market is projected to reach $340.20 billion in 2024. According to the numbers on Statista, the annual growth rate (CAGR 2024-2028) of profit is 6.56%, leading to a market volume of $438.70 billion by the year 2028.
On the flip side, the unprecedented growth comes with escalating cases of cyber attacks, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS). For this reason, data center and DDoS mitigation solutions are among the things every provider has to pay close attention to. DDoS attacks are a leading cause of downtime, and with costs surpassing $1 million, DDoS mitigation becomes unavoidable for anyone who wants to stay in the industry.
How Big of a Threat Are DDoS Attacks?
The truth is DDoS attacks are not uncommon, and ignoring the risks is not only naive but also irresponsible and unprofessional.
Whether a small NGO or a cross-border multinational, your organization’s online services, including emails, websites, and anything that uses the internet, can be brought to a grinding halt by a DDoS attack.
Being highly vigilant is even more important when it comes to data center and DDoS mitigation. For data center and colocation providers, DDoS attacks threaten the whole network and service availability infrastructure, impacting all customers, subscribers, and tenants.
Data Center and DDoS Mitigation: Facing the Challenges of Emerging Tools of Attack
While the rise of AI and automation tools is widely celebrated in the world, there’s a dark side to it data centers and service providers know best. Like the rest of the world, cybercriminals also have access to new tools, which are accessible at a small price or even for free. The occurrence, scale, and complexity of DDoS attacks have escalated because cybercriminals have easy access to these tools, allowing them to use new strategies for malicious purposes. The emerging AI tools make it possible to create deepfakes and other deceptive content that can fool even the most well-informed and vigilant people.
The worst part is that not only can DDoS attacks result in significant financial loss, but they can undermine an otherwise trustworthy company’s reputation as well.
Data Centers and DDoS Mitigation: Why it’s Important
On June 1, 2022, a series of HTTPS DDoS attacks targeting Google Cloud peaked at 46 million requests per second. The incident was the largest Layer 7 DDoS at that time. However, the Google Cloud was hit again in August 2023. This time the “siege” peaked at an unparalleled 398 million requests per second (RPS).
Cloudflare and AWS also got their share of attacks. Cloudflare deflected a 201 million RPS attack, while AWS got away with defending against a 155 million RPS.
These are the largest attacks ever, but even the smallest of incidents can significantly affect a data center’s services, emphasizing the importance of data center and DDoS mitigation.
Availability Concerns
Uninterrupted availability is essential for a data center to satisfy its clients. As internet-based services have become integral to efficient business operations, data center customers are increasingly looking for data centers that offer reliable and secure connectivity.
A DDoS attack can compromise a data center tenant’s business-critical service. Total loss or impairment of service availability caused by a DDoS attack can result in customer dissatisfaction, a higher churn rate, a tarnished brand image, and lost revenue. That’s why data center and DDoS mitigation are inseparable terms.
Data Centers Must Stay One Step Ahead of Cyber Criminals
A customer-centric data center must be able to detect and respond fast enough to a DDoS attack. Also, data center and colocation providers must have the capacity to identify and differentiate between a sudden surge of fraudulent requests and genuine usage in real time. This is necessary to block malicious traffic effectively without causing any interruption to clients’ regular business activities.
A robust data center and DDoS mitigation solution should offer essential features and functionalities, including:
- IP reputation lists
- Anomaly detection
- Benchmarking
- Attack mitigation
- Connection and rate limits
According to the A10 Networks report, it’s not uncommon for data centers to fail to detect a DDoS attack leading to sluggish performance and reduced service uptime. In fact, some facilities don’t have any infrastructure or solution to enable them to identify a DDoS threat.
What to Look for in a DDoS Attack Solution
There’s more to a data center and DDoS mitigation than what’s visible at first glance. Providing clients with remote management, IT consultation, troubleshooting, and managed network services is important, but data centers and colocation facilities are also responsible for safeguarding their infrastructure and clients by offering protection against DDoS attacks.
When looking for a solution to provide DDoS protection, data centers should pick one that offers the following:
Surgical Multi-Vector DDoS Protection
Choose a solution that allows you to identify and resolve multiple attack types, including resources, protocol, volumetric, IoT-based, and application-level strikes.
Zero-day Automated Protection (ZAP)
A data center DDoS mitigation solution with ZAP capability leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to discover attacks without human intervention or the need for advanced configuration.
That way, the data center can respond to DDoS attacks quickly, which is crucial at a time when cybercriminals are using sophisticated strategies. It also allows facilities to minimize operating costs, errors, and downtime.
Higher Service Availability
Choose a solution that ensures service availability by automatically detecting irregularities across your infrastructure and mitigating multi-vector DDoS attacks.
Scalable Protection
A robust data center DDoS mitigation solution should be capable of large-scale expansion to enable seamless flow distribution. High scalability also means the solution can protect your IT hardware from DDoS attacks.
Simple Management Interface
A good DDoS attack solution should be hard to configure or use. You want one that allows quick troubleshooting and debugging.
In addition, the solution should have an all-inclusive dashboard with advanced reporting, policy enforcement, and mitigation consoles for multiple devices.
What’s more, the dashboard should include basic graphic reporting and a Unique user access point for each tenant.
Volico Data Center’s DDoS Mitigation Services Guarantee Uninterrupted Traffic Flow
DDoS attacks and cybercriminals are becoming more sophisticated — that’s why Volico has put solid mitigation solutions in place to protect our infrastructure and clients.
We don’t use outdated on-demand strategies, which are unacceptable in today’s environment, where businesses need their internet-based services and applications running around the clock.
Volico Data Center DDoS mitigation services are designed to ensure no delays between the onset of an attack and recovery. Our resource-efficient and error-free mitigation solutions are ideal for businesses seeking to optimize their operations and reduce downtime.
At Volico, we’ve assisted hundreds of clients in implementing their solutions in data centers while ensuring they remain safeguarded from today’s multi-faceted DDoS attacks.
We’ve helped customers mitigate typical attacks, usually brief, seemingly minor, and hard to differentiate from legitimate traffic. And while such attacks may not appear impactful, they can slow down your IT infrastructure and prevent you from using crucial applications and services.
We use real-time, automated DDoS mitigation technology to mitigate these attacks to deliver protection at full edge bandwidth, safeguarding data up to tens of terabits per second. That way, you don’t have to analyze events or reroute traffic manually, reducing the time it takes to detect, mitigate, and protect against threats to just a few seconds.
DDoS Protection as a Service
Volico also offers DDoS protection as a service for providers, enabling them to deliver DDoS mitigation as a premium security add-on to their tenants.
Data center and DDoS mitigation services like ours allow you to manage your options via multi-tenant portals. This enables you to onboard clients and create and deploy service levels on intuitive dashboards.
Why Volico Data Center and DDoS Protection Services?
Our DDoS mitigation solutions offer a range of benefits, including:
- Multiple layers of security features
- Immediate response is available around the clock for DDoS attacks
- Quick deployment of a ready-made solution to stop threats
- Ensuring maximum uptime and availability during DDoS attacks
- Non-intrusive – no need for upgrades or re-architecting
- Immediate alerts in real-time
- Detection of unusual events or behaviors
- Qualified and certified staff available for support
- Detailed analysis of network traffic
- A robust system in place to detect unauthorized access or attacks
What Next?
Every forward-thinking data center and colocation facility should deploy cutting-edge DDoS mitigation solutions. As threats evolve, organizations recognize the critical importance of a resilient data center and DDoS mitigation solution to avoid the risks associated with disruptions.
To get started with Volico DDoS Mitigation Services, contact one of our experts to discuss your specific needs and the best solution. You can also request a free quote, and we’ll get back to you in less than 24 hours.
• Call: (305) 735-8098
• Chat with a member of our team to discuss which solution best fits your needs.
