In the intricate world of cybersecurity, DDoS attacks pose a critical concern for businesses and organizations as they can overwhelm their online infrastructure and render it inaccessible to legitimate users. This means losing potential customers and revenue.
One way to prevent this is by investing in DDoS protection. But what does it even mean?
In this blog, we walk you through what DDos Protection is and the various benefits it offers you in a digital landscape where your assets, profits, and reputation hang in the balance.
What is DDoS Protection?
Distributed Denial of Service Protection, or DDoS protection, is a critical cybersecurity measure that is designed to defend digital infrastructure from malicious attacks — DDoS attacks.
In a DDoS attack, malevolent entities attempt to disrupt the normal operations of a website or network by flooding it with an overwhelming amount of internet traffic. As a result, the digital resource may slow down or crash, becoming inaccessible to legitimate users.
To prevent this, DDoS protection services employ advanced techniques to detect, limit, and neutralize these attacks, ensuring that your online services remain operational and accessible.
For instance, in 2020, Amazon Web Services (AWS) survived one of the largest DDoS attacks to date. The attack flooded the AWS website with so much information, with speeds as high as 2.3 terabits per second (Tbps) coming into its servers.
However, since they had DDoS protection systems in place, they were able to mitigate the attack without compromising user information. To give you perspective, AWS is a cloud computing service that caters to over 1 million companies, governments, and individuals.
Unlike traditional cyberattacks that focus on breaching security or stealing data, DDoS attacks aim to render the targeted system unavailable to its users, effectively denying them access.
But, by identifying abnormal traffic patterns and filtering out malicious requests, DDoS protection safeguards against the potential disruptions, data breaches, and financial losses that can result from such attacks.
Here are two forms of DDoS Protection:
Cloud-based DDoS Protection
Cloud-based DDoS protection is an approach to cybersecurity that leverages cloud infrastructure to defend online resources against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
Unlike traditional on-site DDoS protection services that rely on local resources, cloud-based DDoS protection takes advantage of the bandwidth, scale, and real-time monitoring capabilities of cloud platforms to mitigate DDoS threats effectively.
A cloud-based DDoS protection server offers users advantages such as traffic diversion and filtering, scalability, and automation.
Managed DDoS Protection
Managed DDoS protection service refers to a system whereby a business or organization leverages a third-party team of dedicated experts to provide a comprehensive range of cybersecurity services.
In other words, a managed IT service provider takes up the task of monitoring and mitigating DDoS attacks on your organization’s website.
Managed DDoS protection is particularly beneficial to businesses that lack the in-house expertise, resources, or time to handle DDoS threats effectively. So, by partnering with a managed service provider, you can ensure your online services remain active and operational.
Other advantages of managed DDoS protection include 24/7 monitoring, expertise, and real-time monitoring.
Why is DDoS Protection Important?
Here are some reasons DDoS protection is essential to the operations and growth of any business or organization with an online presence.
Increased Traffic Capacity
One of the advantages of investing in a DDoS protection service is that it increases the capacity for how much traffic your online infrastructure can manage.
Since DDoS attacks generally involve overwhelming the target network with an unusually high volume of incoming traffic, DDoS protection helps safeguard against this.
DDoS protection solutions are designed to enhance your website’s traffic capacity by freeing up the infrastructure to take on larger volumes of incoming data without any downtime. So, by beefing up your online infrastructure’s DDoS protection, you increase its capacity to handle both legitimate and malicious traffic.
Increased Flow of Concurrent Access
More often than not, DDoS attacks target the application layer, where web applications and services interact directly with users.
By exploiting potential vulnerabilities in the application layer, these attacks can overload your servers and databases, causing disruptions in your services.
However, by leveraging effective DDoS protection systems, you’ll have access to traffic inspection and filtering mechanisms to identify and get ahead of malicious requests while ensuring your legitimate users still have access to your online services.
This increased flow of concurrent access means users can still use your online platform even during a DDoS attack.
Further Scalability
As your business grows and you expand your online presence, you’ll also be placing a lot more demand on your digital infrastructure.
Thankfully, comprehensive DDoS protection solutions can seamlessly scale alongside your organization’s growth. This ensures that your protective mechanisms are up to the task even as your infrastructure increases.
In addition to keeping your online services safe against evolving attack techniques, DDoS protection also helps you scale and adapt to changing internet traffic patterns without compromising on user experience.
Difference Between DDoS and Mitigation in the Cloud
DDoS protection and mitigation in the cloud are two integral strategies aimed at countering Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. However, they operate in very different ways.
Let’s explore the key differences between DDoS protection and mitigation in the cloud:
DDoS Protection
DDoS protection refers to a comprehensive set of practices and technologies designed to prevent, detect, and minimize the impact of DDoS attacks. It encompasses a proactive approach to safeguarding systems and networks from potential attacks.
Some of the measures involved in DDoS protection include firewalls, intrusion detection systems, load balancing, rate limiting, and traffic filtering.
Generally, the goal of DDoS protected web hosting is to ensure that malicious traffic doesn’t overwhelm the target infrastructure.
Mitigation in the Cloud
Here, the approach to handling DDoS attacks is by leveraging cloud infrastructure and services.
Cloud-based mitigation involves diverting the incoming traffic through a cloud service provider’s infrastructure equipped with advanced filtering and traffic analysis capabilities.
The cloud service provider examines the incoming traffic patterns to differentiate between legitimate user requests and malicious traffic. Once identified, the malicious traffic is blocked or filtered out, allowing only actual users to reach the target network or system.
Here are some key differences between DDoS Protection and Mitigation in the Cloud:
- Approach: DDoS protection focuses on security protocols to defend against potential DDoS attacks, while Cloud-based mitigation generally involves redirecting incoming traffic to a cloud provider’s infrastructure for real-time analysis and filtering during an ongoing DDoS attack.
- Proactivity vs. Reactivity: DDoS protection is a proactive strategy, while mitigation in the cloud is more reactive. In other words, DDoS protected web hosting; you prepare for potential attacks while cloud-based mitigation reacts to detected DDoS attacks.
- Infrastructure: On one hand, DDoS protection leverages existing organizational network infrastructure and security systems. On the other hand, mitigation in the cloud means you have to rely on the capabilities of the cloud provider’s infrastructure.
- Response Capability: DDoS protection is generally better at preventing attacks but may experience challenges in handling larger attacks in real-time. On the other hand, cloud-based mitigation can conveniently handle larger-scale attacks quickly since it relies on the cloud provider’s distributed resources.
Get More Advice on DDoS Protection
DDoS attacks remain an ever-present digital threat, especially as your business grows and you scale up your online infrastructure.
Therefore, it is crucial that every business owner invests in robust and effective DDoS protection measures to prevent attacks on their online systems that can result in potential data loss, lost revenue, and damaged reputation.
Do you require DDoS protection services or have questions you’d like to ask? Please, reach out to us at Oplink.net. We have qualified experts waiting to help you!