In addition to dealing with Mother Nature-related incidents, organizations must contend with malicious and relentless cybercriminals who issue Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks that can cause prolonged periods of downtime. Companies unable to respond to DDoS threats in a timely fashion will lose revenue and customers if operations are offline long enough.
Beta News' Darren Anstee recently detailed some of the common myths surrounding DDoS protection. Some businesses feel they will not be targets of such threats – a dangerous sentiment that must not be followed. Given that there are do-it-yourself DDoS kits available, anyone can become an attacker and any firm can become the victim.
Organizations can also run into problems if they believe DDoS protection only requires a single layer of protection, Anstee wrote. Defense against these threats must be multi-faceted and involve more modern tools.
Some businesses are still in the camp that thinks intrusion prevention systems, firewalls and content delivery networks are enough to combat DDoS incidents. However, Anstee indicated this is not the case, concluding that companies must take a different approach to keep these threats at bay.
"Organizations must rethink their DDoS protection."
TechTarget reported similar suggestions, noting routers, load balancers and networks can fail against DDoS incidents. For small companies with limited resources, there may not be many options available internally to implement more effective solutions.
Many businesses are in the same boat
Despite the widespread nature of DDoS, businesses are still not taking these threats seriously. In 2014, a SANS survey found that nearly two-thirds of organizations did not allocate any of their budgets to DDoS protection or for assistance from IT partners, TechTarget reported.
This discovery is most concerning given the length and financial losses of DDoS incidents in general. SANS found the average DDoS event lasted 8.7 hours in 2014, while some businesses experienced nearly double this time frame, as reported by TechTarget.
The news source also cited two industry reports detailing the average costs of a single DDoS attack. Market research firm Gartner indicated firms will lose $336,000 per hour. The Ponemon Institute said data center outages result in $474,000 in losses per hour.
Where should organizations turn?
With revenue, customer base and brand reputation all at stake, companies that want to improve their DDoS protection should consider looking outside of their businesses for assistance. Disaster specialists are helpful partners that work with clients to shore up any IT vulnerabilities that could result in prolonged operational downtime.
Whether firms seek assistance to enhance their business continuity and disaster recovery protocols or to protect themselves against DDoS threat, third-party specialists have them covered.