On 16 September 2019, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) hosting provider announced the launch of its next-generation anti-DDoS platform equipped with ‘intelligent’ clustering techniques and a multi-tiered architecture to address the growth of sophisticated DDoS threats.
WorldStream is a hosting provider with a 10 Tbps global network backbone and over 15,000 dedicated servers. The provider has more than tripled the size of its R&D department from 3 to 10 engineering employees and has released its redesigned and re-engineered its DDoS platform, DDoS Shield.
The new scrubbing centre is located in WorldStream’s company-owned data centres in Naaldwijk, the Netherlands, and is said to be equipped with the latest techniques in the clustering field. WorldStream hopes it DDoS centre will be ‘future-proof’ and able to withstand the largest DDoS, as well as advanced ‘under the radar’ attacks for its clients.
“DDoS can be seen as a significant risk for enterprises and virtually all organizations with business-critical applications. We’ve seen some very serious DDoS attacks on various types of organizations during the last couple of years, large and small, including high-profile financial brands such as ING, ABN AMRO, and Banco de España. We saw well-known global developer platform GitHub experiencing one of the largest DDoS attacks in history, with an attack peaking at 1.35Tbps. And most recently, in June of this year, messaging service platform Telegram was shut down by a massive DDoS attack,” said Nick de Jong, Sales Director of WorldStream.
As WorldStream is providing IaaS hosting services to quite some high-profile customers including broadcasters and cloud providers, we want our DDoS scrubbing centre to be fully prepared for the latest DDoS developments and trends. The fact that the WorldStream DDoS Shield is now fitted with intelligent clustering technology and a multi-tiered approach to DDoS protection will bring our customers ultimate safety and peace of mind,” commented de Jong.
Custom Clustering Technology
“As the number of dedicated servers under management in our data centres and the volume of our worldwide Internet network traffic have grown massively lately, we needed a better-scaling technology to power our anti-DDoS capabilities,” said Tim Vollebregt, Network Director of WorldStream. “At the same time, we wanted to modernize and further enhance the technology stack behind our anti-DDoS solution. Off-the-shelf products available on the global market were not meeting our demanding and high-scalability anti-DDoS requirements though, so it took our R&D and Network teams about a year to come up with [the] current intelligent clustering-based solution,” Vollebregt added.
“Intelligent clustering is a technique in which given interrelated details in Internet traffic get divided into groups called clusters and analyzed as such,” Vollebregt continued. “Based on smart clustering algorithms and a multi-tier approach, we are subsequently able to handle the highest volumes of bandwidth in a sophisticated and highly scalable manner. This intelligent, multi-tiered clustering technology truly fits our high-bandwidth volume requirements. Traditional off-the-shelf products were only analyzing and validating inbound traffic when it comes to high-bandwidth usage. By developing our own intelligent anti-DDoS technology, we’re now able to analyze inbound as well as outbound traffic during a DDoS attack. This maximizes the DDoS-detection accuracy for the overall traffic flow of our high-bandwidth clients,” added Vollebregt.
“With the new WorldStream DDoS Shield platform we’re able to handle all kinds of current and future DDoS threats, the high-profile attacks as well as the smaller, sneakier ‘under the radar’ attacks. We can scale the anti-DDoS platform on the fly and easily capitalize on the latest DDoS trends. Our Network and R&D teams will have to keep working on it continuously, but the management controls in place allow for quick and flexible responses to evolving and new threat developments,” said Mr Vollebregt.
Edited by Kojo Essah
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