Alcatel-Lucent and Arbor Networks team up against DDoS attacks
Alcatel-Lucent and Arbor Networks joined forces to tackle the growing threat of DDoS attacks.
Such attacks can compromise the communication networks used to provide a growing array of cloud services as well as businesses that carry large volumes of critical data traffic over the Internet. With the world’s top five percent of Internet data centers experiencing as many as 500 attacks a month, Alcatel-Lucent and Arbor are today offering a joint solution that provides advanced DDoS protection and security capabilities to help address this escalating challenge.
These cloud-based security services address the concerns of 3,386 IT Decision Makers that participated in a recent Alcatel-Lucent global study. Study participants cited performance and security as the two areas of cloud services needing the most improvement.
A new class of carrier cloud also addresses this by combining the computing power and flexibility of the cloud, with the security, reliability and guaranteed performance of communications networks.
Carrier clouds provide an ideal way of detecting and eliminating DDoS attacks quickly. Today, when network attacks are detected, the infected traffic is typically transported to a central location for treatment. With the largest sustained attacks on networks consuming 100 gigabits per second of capacity, transporting infected traffic to centralized locations can be both expensive and disruptive.
By integrating Arbor’s Threat Management System (TMS) software into Alcatel-Lucent’s IP routers – wherever they are located in a given network – attacks can be detected and dealt with at the edge of the cloud, closer to the location of the attack, which is a much more effective and less costly approach.
In addition to making service providers own cloud networks and services more resilient, this new solution also enables them to offer a cloud-based service to detect and mitigate DDoS attacks on the networks of their enterprise customers.
This represents a lucrative revenue opportunity because many businesses do not have the skill-set or resources to keep up with this rapidly escalating threat on their own. Service providers can deliver denial-of-service “scrubbing’ as a cloud-based service from the same platform as VPN and business Internet services, with minimal incremental investment.