The Power of Proximity: Local DDoS Scrubbing Centers Enhance Security
Akamai recently unveiled brand-new scrubbing centers in Chennai and Mumbai, which afford regional customers access to higher quality security. More broadly, the strategic placement of scrubbing centers in local regions can significantly improve the ability to combat new and emerging cyberthreats.
Read on to discover how emphasizing regional proximity in your scrubbing center placement strategy can drive your enterprise organization’s distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) filtering efforts to greatly enhance corporate security.
What are DDoS attacks?
DDoS attacks are one of the oldest and most notorious cyberattack approaches. These attacks attempt to take down website or network resources by flooding them with multiple safe-appearing malicious traffic sources. DDoS attacks can prevent legitimate users from buying and using a business’s products and services — making them a significant threat to any organization.
DDoS attacks remain a top priority for organizations — especially when DDoS attacks are launched in conjunction with other harmful attack vectors.
Worse, these types of attacks are rapidly evolving, as illustrated by the increasingly sophisticated attacks from organized cybercrime groups and state-funded actors. This evolution is dramatically increasing the risk for businesses without proper defenses. Since 2020, we’ve identified a surge of record-setting DDoS extortion attacks in addition to hacktivism, and an explosion of novel threats (Figure).
Fig.: Increasing attack vectors (Source: Ankita Kharya [Akamai blog])
Defend against DDoS attacks
One of the most effective approaches for defending your digital infrastructure and assets against DDoS attacks and other threats is to strategically distribute scrubbing centers. These scrubbing centers can examine traffic before it reaches your cloud or data center servers.
We’re constantly strengthening our defense platform to ensure that Akamai Prolexic, our DDoS protection solution, can outpace the latest threats and cybercriminals. With the launch of our next-generation scrubbing centers, we’re progressing toward a wholly software-defined, high-performance, scalable infrastructure that provides increased functionality and improved flexibility and reliability.
The advantages of localization
As part of our mission to mitigate DDoS attacks in the Asia-Pacific region via localization, Akamai recently launched two new scrubbing centers in India that cater to our customers with a local presence. Akamai is also expanding our scrubbing center footprint to additional global regions to help customers can stay protected from cyberthreats, and the new centers will offer advantages like:
- Minimized latency and optimized network performance
- Optimized costs
- Enhanced visibility and control
- Consolidated security additions
Minimize latency and optimize network performance
Traditional DDoS defense approaches rely on centralized scrubbing center models and the diversion of traffic to a specified location — resulting in increased latency and potential bottlenecks. Instead, by leveraging local scrubbing centers that are strategically positioned across different regions, you can clean up network traffic closer to its attack source, which will minimize latency and optimize network performance to provide uninterrupted service delivery to end users.
Optimize costs
Standard DDoS protection models often require organizations to redirect traffic to a centralized scrubbing center location at the expense of high network bandwidth and infrastructure investments. Conversely, local scrubbing centers filter traffic at the network’s edge to significantly reduce the volume of traffic that needs forwarding to a centralized facility. This localized approach optimizes bandwidth costs and eliminates the need for excessive infrastructure investments, making it an efficient, resourceful solution for organizations.
Enhance visibility and control
Local scrubbing centers give organizations increased visibility into and control over the nature and patterns of region-specific DDoS attacks, enabling more robust proactive threat detection and continual security measure improvements. In doing so, your organization can preempt emerging cyberthreats, quickly adapt your security strategies, and implement targeted countermeasures to more effectively protect your networks.
Consolidate security additions
Scrubbing centers sit in front of your organization’s entire security infrastructure to provide DDoS protection and further security capabilities on your internet edge location.
To that end, Akamai has integrated our newly launched Network Cloud Firewall into Prolexic. This powerful tool is easy to use and deploy so you can quickly start centrally blocking your entire network from any traffic type.
Strengthen your security posture to help eliminate cyberthreats
As the cyberthreat landscape continues to evolve, organizations must adopt innovative approaches to continually safeguard their networks, data, and customers. Local DDoS scrubbing centers offer strategic advantages that boost response times, optimize costs, optimize network performance, increase data sovereignty compliance, and enhance visibility and control.
With the power of scrubbing center proximity, your organization can strengthen its corporate security posture and more effectively mitigate DDoS attacks to ensure consistently smooth business operations.
Find out more
Read on to learn more about Akamai’s industry-leading DDoS prevention solutions that can apply the advantages of local scrubbing centers and help you mitigate increasingly sophisticated threats.
