How OnlineTech Stayed Ahead of the Cyber-Threat Curve
I live relatively close to Ashburn, Virginia, which you may know is a major exchange point for the Internet. Our area has gone through phases of development over the past 15-20 years that I’ve lived in there, starting with an explosion of residential development (which we can thank in large part for our notoriously bad traffic). But more recently I’ve noticed a shift in the development and construction within the region. Rarely does a week pass now where I don’t notice a new area being cleared for significant construction. I have a friend in commercial real estate and any time I ask him if he knows what’s going into the most recently cleared space, the answer inevitably is “a data center.”
The explosion of data center development in this area makes very real and tangible the dramatic growth being experienced by the cloud services and hosting industry, as they increasingly represent a high percentage of incoming tenants. According to 451 Research, the cloud services space is projected to grow another 36% over the next year, finishing 2016 just shy of $20 billion.
These boom times for the Cloud Service Provider do come at a price, however. Increasingly, these providers are becoming targets for the kinds of cyber-security threats that previously honed in primarily on enterprises and the largest of carriers or network providers. DDoS attacks, zero-day attacks and malware, and advanced application attacks are just a few of the threats creating new levels of risk for cloud providers.
To successfully protect their own infrastructures and the customers they support, cloud service providers are looking to highly scalable security solutions that can be deployed flexibly to leverage data and visibility from across large, often shared networks.
One such provider that has proven a commitment to staying ahead of the threat curve and protecting customers is OnlineTech out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. After seeing the growth in cyber-attacks against its own infrastructure, OnlineTech knew it needed a more scalable, forward-looking strategy for protection. Plus, with the reality that today companies from any vertical represent cyber threat targets, they knew every new customer represented both increased risk and potential victims of collateral damage from attacks on other customers.
Online Tech wanted to provide an even higher level of security throughout its entire network. The company, like most others, experienced an increase of volumetric attacks. Although these attacks were being blocked, Online Tech did not want its network performance to be affected.
According to Nick Lumsden, Director of Infrastructure at OnlineTech, “historically, we would see one volumetric attack per year. We now see more than four times the amount as well as many low and slow attacks.”
Earlier this summer, OnlineTech deployed Radware’s Attack Mitigation System to provide a centralized attack management, monitoring and reporting solution including real-time identification, prioritization and response to these attacks. The timing of their decision to explore and deploy cyber-attack protection proved critical. Since deployment of Radware’s Attack Mitigation System, OnlineTech has been able to successfully defend itself and its customers from a nearly constant stream of attacks.
Our recently published case study about OnlineTech highlights the details of the situation and solution they put in place, and may act as a good guide for other Cloud Service Providers looking to proactively protect customers.
Additionally, our new solution architecture paper provides some additional details about some of the common technical deployments proving successful for providers. It also highlights how Radware’s Attack Mitigation Architecture is specifically designed to meet the demands of large cloud service providers, including a multi-tiered architecture for visibility, automated attack detection and mitigation, and multi-tenant support.
