DDoS protection defends your websites, applications and networks against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, where an attacker floods your systems with traffic from many sources until they slow down or stop. A DDoS protection solution watches for abnormal traffic, filters out the malicious requests and lets genuine users through. Good protection covers the network and transport layers, where large volume floods hit, and the application layer, where attacks look more like ordinary web requests. An outage caused by an attack costs you sales, staff time and customer goodwill.
For any business that relies on a website, customer portal, API or online service, DDoS protection is about staying available. Most services spot an attack as it starts, send the traffic through scrubbing centres that strip out the bad requests, and pass clean traffic back to you. That works whether the target is a public site, an API or the systems behind them. If you have uptime commitments to customers, or your revenue stops when your site does, it pays to have protection and a plan in place before an attack, not during one.
In a DDoS attack, thousands of devices, often infected computers and cloud servers, send traffic to your site or service at the same time. The target runs out of bandwidth, connections or processing power, and real users cannot get through. Attacks fall into three groups: volumetric floods that fill your internet connection, protocol attacks that exhaust network equipment, and application-layer attacks that look like ordinary web requests.
Decide which services must stay online and how long you can tolerate an outage. Know who to call, at your provider and inside the company, and keep the contact details somewhere that does not depend on the network under attack. Test the plan, and check that your protection covers every public address, including APIs and mail servers. See also load balancers and web application firewalls.
Compare the size of attack it can absorb, how fast it reacts, whether it is always on or switched on after an attack starts, and what it does to normal traffic. Ask about reporting and how it handles encrypted traffic. Cost often depends on bandwidth and the number of protected addresses, so list yours before asking for quotes.
A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack floods a website, application or network with traffic from many sources so that real users cannot reach it.
Not usually. A DDoS attack aims to make a service unavailable, not to steal data. Attackers sometimes use one as a distraction while they try something else, so keep your other monitoring switched on.
A firewall can block simple floods, but large attacks fill your internet connection before the firewall sees them. Large attacks need upstream protection from a provider or a cloud scrubbing service.
Always-on services filter traffic from the start. On-demand services have to be switched on, which can take some minutes. The right choice depends on how much an outage would hurt.
If your revenue or operations depend on a website, portal or API, yes, at least at a basic level. Many hosting providers and content delivery networks include some protection, so check what you already have.
Yes. We work from our base in Sharjah with businesses in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and the rest of the UAE. Most of the work can be done remotely, and we arrange site visits where they are needed.
