Arbor Networks Targets DDoS Mitigation with Stand-alone Appliance

Arbor Networks is pitching a stand-alone version of its Peakflow Threat Management System technology to help protect data centers from distributed denial-of-service attacks. 

In the release of Arbor's Peakflow SP 5.5 platform, the company opted to introduce TMS as a stand-alone appliance to help mitigate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against hosting and Internet data center infrastructure.

Multitenant environments are prime targets for DDoS attacks, and attacks are moving from volumetric-based—where they try to simply overwhelm the connection with data—to application layer DDoS attacks that target specific services, the company said. Peakflow TMS addresses the issue of availability by identifying and removing network and application layer attacks without interrupting the flow of legitimate traffic.

“The smaller hosting providers may need a dedicated DDoS mitigation without the Peakflow SP for detection and reporting,” said Rakesh Shah, Arbor’s director of product marketing. “The stand-alone TMS can be quickly and cost-effectively deployed to stop common DDoS attacks in front of hosted or dedicated services in data centers.”

Likewise, managed security service providers (MSSPs) may want to deploy dedicated DDoS mitigation for enterprise customers, and the stand-alone appliance will allow them to do it quickly, Shah said.

Peakflow SP 5.5 also includes a bevy of new features, such as geography-based IP alerting and mitigation when traffic spikes come from unexpected countries as well as support for 4-byte Autonomous Systems Numbers.

“Enterprises continue to cite security and availability as the top barrier to adoption of cloud computing,” said Rob Ayoub, global program director for information security research at Frost & Sullivan, in a statement. “The cost savings and efficiencies are enticing, but the prospect of having critical corporate information offline and beyond their direct control remains a real inhibitor to adoption. Given these concerns, hosting and other data center operators today must have the ability to mitigate attacks without interrupting customer facing services. This is no longer an option.”