A DDoS protection strategy can be used to defend against distributed denial of service attacks. However, it is not a silver bullet. Other mitigation techniques and technologies such as firewalls and IDS/IPS solutions need to be implemented to identify and take corrective actions for any malicious traffic that reaches the organization’s network.
DDoS protection should be integrated with the organization’s overall security strategy and it should be deployed in a manner that is as transparent as possible to legitimate users. According to a report by Arbor Networks, the average attack size in 2011 was 11.4 Gbps. What does this mean? It means that an organization must deploy a DDoS mitigation solution that has the capability to defend against attacks of much greater size than a few tens of Mbps.
When choosing a protection strategy, it is important to consider four techniques: edge server shielding, upstream aggregation, decentralization, and WAFs.
In this blog, we will cover each of these.
Edge server shielding
Edge servers shield content publishers from large-scale denial of service attacks. An edge server shields content publishers from large-scale denial of service attacks. The content publisher can publish content and the edge server will deal with any issues in a timely manner. This way, the site won’t go down even if the attacker has access to all the content in the website.
A typical edge server is based on a commercial solution like Akamai or Limelight. These solutions offer powerful protection against most DDOS attacks and cloud hosting options.
Upstream aggregation
The company would like to up-stream all of its data to one central point in order to more easily manage the data across the organization. Upstream aggregation is an organizational technique that allows companies to consolidate their data. This technique has many benefits including more efficiency, less storage space needed, and easier management of data. One downside to upstream aggregation is possible inconvenience for users who may have to access data remotely instead of locally.
Decentralization DDoS protection strategy
A decentralized DDoS protection strategy is one that does not depend on a single server or point of data. Instead, the data is distributed across multiple servers. This mitigates the risk of downtime, meaning that all data is available to provide service to customers even if one or more servers are unavailable. Decentralization DDoS protection strategy mitigates the risk of downtime because all data is available to provide service to customers even if one or more servers are unavailable.
WAFs as a DDoS protection strategy
WAFs are a fast and effective way to fight DDoS attacks because they filter all incoming traffic before it gets to the application servers.
This makes them an excellent choice for implementing a DDoS protection strategy. This is because WAFs protect your application servers by intercepting all incoming traffic. They do this by filtering out harmful URLs, bad signatures, and malicious protocols before they reach the servers.
