NETSCOUT > Case Studies > Hostopia Detects and Stops DDoS Attacks with Peakflow® SP

Hostopia Detects and Stops DDoS Attacks with Peakflow® SP

Company Size

1,000+

Region

America
Europe

Country

Canada
United States

Product

Peakflow SP
Peakflow SP Threat Management System (TMS)

Tech Stack

DDoS detection
Automatic Mitigation

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Cybersecurity & Privacy - Network Security

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Use Cases

Cybersecurity

Services

System Integration

About The Customer

Hostopia is a leading wholesale provider of private-label Web services, including Web hosting, email, and e-commerce applications. Its customers include telecommunication carriers, cable companies, Internet service providers, domain registrars, and Web-hosting service providers. These providers resell Hostopia’s offerings to small and medium-sized businesses. As a result, these providers count on Hostopia to shield their customers from a wide range of threats, including escalating distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Hostopia operates facilities in North America and Europe.

The Challenge

Hostopia, a leading wholesale provider of private-label Web services, was facing a significant challenge in mitigating the ever-increasing frequency, size, and complexity of DDoS attacks against its network infrastructure and customer services. The technical team at Hostopia had been effective in dealing with DDoS attacks of several gigabits in magnitude, but the effort required was significant. This process required a lot of manual work by several key staff members with very specialized skill sets. Looking to the future, Hostopia realized that scaling its response would be difficult given the anticipated growth in the size and frequency of these attacks. The company was looking for a holistic solution—one that not only would detect DDoS attacks but would also defend against them.

The Solution

To address the challenge, Hostopia deployed the Peakflow SP solution and the Peakflow SP Threat Management System (TMS). Peakflow SP leverages IP flow and routing information embedded in the existing network infrastructure to deliver cost-effective and pervasive network visibility. The solution automatically conducts network anomaly detection and subsequently can easily detect threats such as DDoS attacks. Peakflow SP can also mitigate these attacks using blunt techniques such as router ACLs, BGP black-hole routing, and BGP FlowSpec. For more surgical mitigation, Arbor provides the Peakflow SP TMS solution. Peakflow SP TMS, a fully integrated component of Peakflow SP, removes only the attack traffic while enabling good traffic to continue to flow. Peakflow SP TMS comes in a variety of models that allow the mitigation of attacks ranging from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps using either BGP off-ramping or in-line deployment.

Operational Impact

Significant reduction in the time, effort, and manpower needed to thwart DDoS attacks.
Ability to automatically mitigate all attacks over a certain threshold.
Ability to assign different security levels to limit the use of the product.
Ability to delegate the monitoring of certain things to its contractors, while isolating them from other capabilities in the product and network.