Attacks on data centers are on the rise and the fastest growing share of these incursions are DDoS assaults that overwhelm data centers and force service disruptions. About 40% of those companies that suffered such attacks reported reputation loss as one of their primary concerns.
Radware’s Eric Bueno asserts that the easiest way to lose a customer is to have an unreliable data center in this article published in DataCenter Dynamics:
45 percent of security leaders said that attacking the data center and causing a business to grind to a halt was more prevalent than theft, which was only true in 35 percent of cases. But whichever way you look at it, the reasons still boil down to the notion that attacks are done to cause harm. Just eight percent are for other reasons including espionage.
So where does that leave the data center custodian? Above all it is a reaffirmation that securing the data center has to be a priority into 2019. Data centers are seen as a gateway for hackers and no matter how sophisticated the defenses become they won’t be put off from attacking them. Indeed, with a 15 percent increase in attacks designed to partially or completely disrupt service last year, we should expect attacks on data centers to go up.
So with that in mind, it’s useful to know what kind of attacks to expect. Top of the list is denial of service attacks, both volumetric and non-volumetric designed to exhaust the resources of the target server or application. Typically, but not always, DDoS attacks cause traffic floods that congest the capacity of the targeted network or server and prevent legitimate users from accessing them.
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It’s easy to see why 83 percent of companies are turning to machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to defend their infrastructure. No human can process the attack data rapidly enough to formulate a plan that will ensure success, and for half of companies AI offers a way to react at speed.
Security teams will therefore have to strike that fine balance between selecting technology that can adapt to changing tactics, respond and mitigate against them, and find ways to keep the company up and running as well. That’s doubly hard if you one of the millions of firms undertaking a digital transformation program.
