OREANDA-NEWS. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are not a good news topic, and the news about them seems to only be getting worse. Consider that, according to industry statistics and experts:

  • DDoS attacks are becoming more common.
  • The size of DDoS attacks is increasing.
  • The average cost to an organization of a DDoS attack has risen substantially.

Still, organizations can’t just stand pat and wait for attackers to hit. They need to do whatever they can to detect and mitigate an assault on their systems as fast as possible. A DDoS-mitigation solution developed by F5 Networks, called F5 Silverline, is now available via the Equinix Cloud Exchange and can help the enterprise do just that.

This is a new paradigm for how security services are delivered. Instead of being delivered via a relatively inflexible on-site appliance or through VPN or GRE tunnels that potentially limit performance, the Cloud Exchange allows F5 to give customers a flexible, cloud-like connectivity solution that doesn’t suffer performance degradation. That is good news for businesses that need real-time protection against DDoS attacks.

A solution for a growing problem

A DDoS attack is when hackers shut down a target by using multiple infected systems to flood the target with useless traffic from numerous sources – potentially hundreds of thousands of them. Victims can’t distinguish the good traffic from the bad and also can’t block the traffic because it’s coming from too many directions.

Experts agree that DDoS attacks are growing in both size and frequency. The 2016 Cost of Data Center Outages study by the Ponemon Institute and Emerson Network Power found that DDoS attacks accounted for 22% of unplanned outages in 2016, compared to 3% in 2010.

The Ponemon report also indicated the cost of data center outages is increasing, estimating that the average cost of an outage has risen 38% (from $505,502 to $740,357) between 2010 and 2016.

F5’s Silverline DDoS Protection managed service lowers the cost of a DDoS attack by detecting it in real time, and by using mitigation methods with enough bandwidth to stop even the largest attacks from reaching the enterprise network.

F5 Silverline’s availability on Cloud Exchange delivers better performance and scale than other cloud-based DDoS mitigation solutions, because Cloud Exchange’s provisioning portal offers simple and streamlined delivery of Silverline to F5 customers.

F5 Silverline customers on the Cloud Exchange enjoy direct connections, instead of lower-grade connectivity over other network choices. In addition, provisioning of Cloud Exchange connectivity is fast, and using Cloud Exchange is considerably cheaper than using other service options (MPLS and Layer 2 VPN).

F5 Silverline customers also get access to Cloud Exchange’s dense service providers ecosystem, so they can simultaneously access multiple cloud services via virtualized connections from a single physical port. This enables F5’s Silverline customers to use a DDoS Protection managed service solution in a secure, high-performance environment in conjunction with a multi-cloud model. It’s a better defense against a tireless adversary.

F5 Silverline DDoS Protection is accessible through Cloud Exchange in Equinix data centers in Frankfurt, Singapore, Silicon Valley and Washington, DC with plans to expand in other markets.