Understanding the Business Value Behind DDoS Protection

Security in the enterprise IT world is one of the most important topics which need constant review and education. Managers and executives oftentimes misunderstand many security protocols and insist that security teams focus on other, more revenue generating, measures. Today’s modern IT environment is more susceptible to threat than ever before. Organizations rely on their IT infrastructure as a core business tool. This means that any organization, large or small, can be a potential target of security attacks.

A continuing and growing threat to service availability is distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. In fact, most hosting providers experience DDoS attacks on a regular basis. An effective DDoS defense system can safeguard business operations against DDoS-related outages, but determining the return on investment (ROI) of purchasing and deploying such a system can be challenging. One needs to quantify both the risks of DDoS attacks and their financial consequences.

This white paper from Arbor Networks provides a simple, step-by-step approach for evaluating whether an investment in a DDoS defense system is financially justified. Remember, the overall impact of a DDoS attack is a function of the time it takes to detect the attack, the time needed to mitigate it and the extent of service degradation both before and after mitigation. For many Internet data center (IDC) operators, detection consists of simply waiting for customers to complain, and mitigation consists of dropping all traffic destined to the resource under attack. This form of mitigation may protect the IDC infrastructure and other customers, but it completes the attack on the particular target of the DDoS event. If the target is a high-value customer, the hosting provider will likely suffer financial loss.

The downtime and monetary repercussions of a DDOS attack should help push any organization to begin to truly see and understand this type of security risk. Arbor Networks not only helps you understand the risk of the attack – the paper also outlines the necessary steps for incorporating the DDoS threat risk into your IT security budget. This includes:

Download this white paper today to learn how to minimize such outages and optimize the availability of your hosting services. Using the simple, step-by-step approach described in this paper, providers can model the financial impact of a DDoS attack on their operations and calculate the ROI of an effective DDoS defense solution.