DDoS Attacks Are Creating Outages For More Data Centers

One of the biggest fears for any business is downtime. If your website is down, your customer’s can’t find you. If your office network is down, your employees can’t be productive. Tony Kontzer of Network Computing reports that research has shown that distributed-denial-of-service attacks are a rapidly rising cause of downtime for data centers.

DDoS attacks main goal is to shut down networks and make them unavailable to users. To do this, hackers commonly saturate the networks with communication requests, which overloads servers. These spoofed requests make it impossible to respond to the legitimate traffic resulting in a shut down.

In 2010, a survey revealed that only about 2-percent of data center outages were attributed to DDoS attacks. In a recent survey of 67 data centers, 18-percent of outages were reported as caused by DDoS attacks. Unfortunately, as the attacks have become more frequent, they’ve also become more intelligent. Unlike other causes of outages, specialized technology and even forensic experts could be needed to resolve the aftermath.

One of the most common causes of downtime is human error, which costs companies an average of about $380-thousand to overcome. The most expensive cause of downtime if equipment failure, which costs about $959-thousand on average. DDoS attacks are second on that list and cost $822-thousand to mitigate on average. Overall, the average cost of overcoming an outage has risen sharply in the past three years. The average cost to fix any outage is up about 37-percent since 2010.

While costs are up, the length of outages is declining. It now takes about 86-minutes to resolve an outage, compared to 97-minutes in 2010. This can be attributed to companies investing more in IT and advances in technology. It’s also likely that because the cost per minute of downtime is rising each year, businesses are more likely to act quickly to resolve issues.

This research suggests both that companies need to invest in proper security to protect against costly threats like DDoS attacks and that they need the proper plan in place to quickly recover when disaster strikes. For help with both, call Geek Rescue at 918-369-4335. We specialize in security infrastructure for businesses and creating back-up plans and restore procedures to overcome any issues.