Corero: The double-edged sword of operating a hosting data center

The more customers you host in your data center, the better, right?  Of course, that means more revenue.  And if those customers are in multiple industry verticals, even better, correct?  Supporting a variety of customer types protects  against revenue fluctuations if rough economic times affect a certain vertical and not the others.  But here’s the rub. 

Hosting a diverse set of customers in your data center is a double-edged sword.  The financial benefits  of an expansive customer set are irrefutable. 

However, the flip side of serving a diverse clientele is the increased exposure to becoming a victim of DDoS attacks. 

A DDoS attack on a hosting data center has many repercussions:

  • A DDoS attack on just one hosted customer can create a data center wide outage and major collateral damage for the rest of your customers
  • A compromised hosted server in your data center can be used as a powerful botnet attack source and negatively impact your reputation
  • Any degradation of service availability or outage will cost you revenue

The very success of customer growth makes you susceptible and vulnerable.  It goes without saying that the resulting damage can be costly data center downtime, customer attrition, and a damaged brand.  Thankfully, there are solutions that can help can help you to protect yourself, and your customers from DDoS attacks:

  • Deploying DDoS mitigation on-premises
  • Ensuring real-time detection, alerting and mitigation
  • Gaining greater visibility into traffic in and out of your data center

I invite you to keep checking back on additional posts that will elaborate on each leg of this 3-legged stool and provide detail on how hosting providers can:

  • Protect critical data center infrastructure from DDoS attacks in real-time
  • Ensure service availability and SLA’s are met, even under DDoS attack
  • Offer value added security insight and protection to your hosted customers

Hosting providers, let’s be proactive in securing you and your customers in the face of DDoS attacks. Corero has the solution.

You can read the original article here.