A managed services provider could easily be skeptical about the security risks of Bandwidth on Demand in the future. In reality, however, this technological breakthrough stands to make it easier to combat cybercriminals, at least when it comes to DDoS attacks. Data Center Knowledge recently made an explicit connection between bandwidth speed and the need to address cloud-targeted actions.
The site spoke to Gartner Research VP Lawrence Orans about the likely changes that could come to help prevent some of this traffic-obscuring damage.
"In the past month, we've seen a doubling of the largest DDoS attacks," he said, adding that "the infrastructure providers are going to be looking for ways to beef up their DDoS mitigation" in the near future.
This is an especially relevant concern given the role that DDoS incidents have played in the past year alone.
Dark Reading recently compiled a list of some of the most prominent cases in 2016: game maker Blizzard, the London Stock Exchange and Dyn, a company famous for working with premier online services like Twitter and Reddit, all suffered prominent DDoS attacks with varying effects. At the least, businesses need to be prepared for possible decreases in service speed.
While these have involved different circumstances, the basic principles are all similar: attackers angling to deny service and disrupt standard business.
What can network software and other SDN solutions do in the face of these threats? Though this is still in the future, freeing up bandwidth could give businesses a chance to control online environments. Theoretically, a savvy managed service provider might one day be able to isolate traffic on attacked networks to limit the reach of the attack after it begins. Network Operators could spool large data streams to a dedicated, on-demand circuit for forensic analysis and countermeasure development.
CloudSmartz's SDxSuite is the first step to granting network companies a usable way to start joining the elastic bandwidth revolution. . For providers, the initial conversion will put them ahead of their competition as they prepare for a less constrained internet experience.