In the current setup where everything has gone digital, there are constant cyber threats to businesses, one of the most disruptive being the DDoS attack. A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack bombards a network, website, or online service with excessive traffic causing it to go down, become slow, and incur huge financial losses. Unless proper DDoS protection and cloud services are available, businesses may face devastating operational disruptions.
To ensure business continuity, companies must adopt security measures that are proactive, scalable cloud solutions, and disaster recovery plans. In this article, the best practices for maintaining business resiliency with DDoS protection and cloud services are discussed.
DDoS Attacks – Understanding and Their Effects
What is DDoS Attack?
Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are characterized by flooding a target’s network, server, and/or application by overwhelming requests so that it’s at times legitimate users cannot get services from it. Hackers can use botnet, which are infected devices, in launching such attacks.
Types of DDoS Attacks
- Volumetric Attacks – Flooding bandwidth with massive traffic (e.g. UDP floods, ICMP floods).
- Protocol Attacks – Vulnerable network protocols are exploited (e.g. SYN flood, Ping of Death).
- Application Layer Attacks – Attacks target the web applications (e.g. HTTP flood, Slowloris attack).
Consequences of DDoS Attack
- Downtime of the website and services which would affect customer experience.
- Financial losses can be attributed to the transactions being interrupted.
- Damage to reputation resulting in the loss of trust from the customer.
- Increase in IT expenditure owing to mitigation and recovery.
How Cloud Services Help in Business Continuity
- Scalability and Load Balancing
Cloud platforms distribute traffic across multiple servers so that on any single server, it does not lead to point failure. Auto scaling is the capability of handling these traffic spikes without crash as usual.
- Cloud-Based DDoS Protection
Most of the cloud providers have built-in DDoS mitigation such as:
- Traffic filtering.
- Rate limiting.
- AI monitoring.
- Backup and Disaster Recovery Solutions
Cloud services automatically back up data and provide extensive disaster recovery alternatives to maintain the integrity of data with the ability to recover quickly post-attack.
- Global Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
CDN distributes web traffic to various places; therefore, it reduces the impact of DDoS attacks by absorbing the DDoS traffic before reaching the main server.
DDoS Protection and Cloud Services Best Practices for Business Continuity
- Solid DDoS Protection Strategy
- The cloud providers that are well-known (AWS Shield, Cloudflare or Akamai) are the ones that can be used for a DDoS mitigation.
- The firewalls and IDSs should implement traffic monitoring so that the system is not broken into.
- The restriction on the number of requests that the system can manage should be implemented to limit the number coming from one source.
- Choose A Cloud Resilient Service Provider
- The use of a cloud system that has pre-integrated DDoS protection and real uptime-promises 99.99% with a backup disaster plan is the solution.
- Multi-region cloud enables the automated distribution of workloads depending on the end-user location.
- Install Automatic Failover Mechanisms
- Deploying a load balancer is the best way to send failure attack traffic to the correct servers.
- A geo-redundancy mechanism that regularly check and reroute the user’s service to optimal servers in different regions keeps the service going.
Conclusion
DDoS attacks indeed have become a great concern. However, a strict cybersecurity setup can help the business remain operational even if a DDoS attack occurs, this would be possible by In deploying, dynamic, flexible, easily adjustable (cloud) technology as well as serum and Achilles heel vaccines in businesses.