Aggregating customer traffic in a multi-tenant setting can also aggregate the risk of DDoS attacks

Tom Bienkowski

July 7, 2014

4 Min Read
Cloud Providers: Beware DDoS Domino Effect

In this day and age, almost every organization is using the Internet as a platform for business as they realize the benefit of outsourcing online operations such as websites, storage, e-commerce, email, and domain name system (DNS). It makes sense because it allows them to focus more on the core business. It also brings about lower costs and requires fewer internal resources. As such, cloud and hosting providers are experiencing significant growth as they meet this market demand. But with this increase in growth comes a proportional increase in risk.

With the proliferation of cyber threat and "hacktivist" movements, any organization can be the target of a cyber attack, specifically distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. These days, they are occurring daily because of botnet-for-hire services that charge as little as $2 an hour. However, hosting providers incur a higher risk of being the targets of DDoS attacks than other businesses operating online. Why? They aggregate the risk of all their customers.

The Wikipedia definition of the "domino effect" is a chain reaction that occurs when a small change causes a similar change nearby, which then causes another similar change, and so on in linear sequence. The term is used as an analogy to a falling row of dominoes.

A DDoS attack on one hosting customer can potentially take down the entire operation because they all share the same network infrastructure. In the same way cloud hosting providers pool resources such as bandwidth and storage for their customers, they also pool the aggregated risk of all their customers.

Due to the multi-tenancy nature of cloud-based data centers, a volumetric DDoS attack against one tenant can lead to a domino effect of service outages. Imagine that an attack is launched against one tenant. If the massive amount of malicious traffic bombarding this one tenant can cause the cloud data center to go down or clog up the shared resources, the entire data center can be taken offline or severely slowed. If a company's data center is down because of a DDoS attack, its customers will lose revenue, and the hosting provider will lose revenue and credibility which impacts the viability of the business. This type of outage can be devastating to the reputation and finances of all involved. To make matters worse, the aftershock continues long after the attack has been mitigated.

Because of this looming threat, cloud hosting providers need to proactively defend themselves to ensure service remains available to all of their customers in the event of an attack.

How to avoid becoming the bullseye
The good news is that the risks associated with DDoS attacks can be mitigated. If you don't want to be a victim of the DDoS domino effect, consider four simple strategies that any hosting provider can implement to protect service availability for their customers and themselves:

  • Subscribe to "clean pipes" service from all upstream service providers. Clean pipes will ensure that large-scale DDoS attacks are detected and mitigated in the cloud before they have an impact on the cloud data center, and before customers suffer an outage.

  • Implement an on-premise DDoS mitigation solution. It will enable hosting providers to detect and eliminate stealthy, application-layer DDoS attacks. These attacks target specific applications such as log-in forms and downloads. Due to their narrow focus, they do not require a large amount of traffic, making them very difficult to detect.

  • Monitor traffic inside and outside the cloud data center. Monitoring traffic patterns and protocols is essential to detecting network misuse. Certain systems should be communicating with each other while others should not. When those that should not communicate with each other are communicating, it could mean trouble.

  • Offer additional anti-DDoS service to customers. Operators of cloud data centers can generate additional revenue by offering highly valued DDoS mitigation services to customers. For example, customers who subscribe to the service will have malicious traffic directed against them mitigated. Customers who do not subscribe to the service will simply have their traffic blackholed. This type of service can be a true differentiator in the highly competitive hosting space. The difference between winning and losing business is more and more frequently coming down to valued-added services like managed backup, email and DDoS mitigation.

By taking these precautions, hosting providers can increase their reliability and service availability while generating more revenue by offering valued DDoS protection services to their customers.

— Tom Bienkowski, Director of Product Marketing, Arbor Networks.

About the Author(s)

Tom Bienkowski

Tom has been in the network and security field for over 20 yrs.  During this time he worked for large enterprises as a Network Engineer and for multiple network management and security vendors where he has had roles in Sales Engineering /Management, Technical Field Marketing and Product Management.  Currently at Arbor Networks he's a Director of Product Marketing focusing on the fixed and mobile Service Provider markets. 

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