DDoS: Predominantly Causing Costly Data Center Outages

DDoS Predominantly Causing Costly Data Center Outages

While IT operators have discovered methods to avert unplanned outages, DDoS attacks are still playing its part in wreaking havoc in the data centers. UPS system failure was considered as one of the most common factors leading to power outage. The recent reports released by Emerson states that unexpected downtime can add a whopping $9000 expense to the IT bill. It is said that the costs associated with IT infrastructure outages have increased by 38% since 2010 and the citing figures collected shows that nearly 22% of downtime is caused by DDoS.

Why DDoS attack?

The dark world is even bigger than we imagine. DDoS is a form of cyber attack and the invaders are paid to induce system failure, especially to hit market giants. In 2009, Twitter was shut for hours, which is known to be target of DDoS attack that muted million of Tweeters. It was known as one of the major DDoS attack in those days that took Twitter’s set of expertise 3 hours to bring everything to normalcy.

Big enterprises move sensitive and confidential information and the ultimate aim is to steal this data and ask ransom amount in exchange for reversing the attack. Other reasons for performing DDoS is business competition. Interrupting services temporarily can disrupt entire business processes that directly impacts company’s finance. That’s enough to take over any competition because even seconds of downtime can be expensive for any company.

As data center service providers house thousands of servers with private data of many large and small enterprises, it attracts attackers to cause malicious attempts. “It appears that these attacks are much more frequent and more difficult to contain than other root causes of data center outages,” said Larry Ponemon, Chairman and Founder of the Ponemon Institute. “Specifically, in most cases, dealing with these causes required specialized technologies and forensic expertise.”

This specifically means that companies need to be prepared by implementing a potentially strong disaster recovery strategy. Organizations must take into account the amount of revenue loss they’ll have to incur while sketching a security plan.