Your Internet data center (IDC) plays a vital role in the success of your business—regardless of whether you’re a large enterprise, e-commerce company or traditional service provider trying to replace diminishing Internet access revenue with outsourced IT services such as email, Web hosting or software as a service (SaaS). Yet modern-day IDC operators face daunting challenges associated with network security and performance. Today, many of the world’s largest IDCs rely on Arbor Peakflow solutions to overcome these challenges and help ensure availability, profitability and customer satisfaction.
Today’s IDC needs a network security solution that can simultaneously protect its network infrastructure, IP-based services and data—all of which are vulnerable to attacks or compromise. The Peakflow product family is one such solution that offers these three pillars of protection for your IDC.
The Arbor Peakflow network security solution for Internet data centers consists of three main products.
1. Arbor Peakflow SP (“Peakflow SP”): The de facto security standard for the majority of the world’s leading service providers, Peakflow SP leverages IP flow, Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) data to deliver:
Pervasive, cost-effective visibility into your IDC’s network, application and routing traffic.
A platform for in-cloud, managed DDoS protection services that can be provided as an additional revenue-generating offering for protecting your customer services and data within your IDC.
2. Arbor Peakflow SP Threat Management System (“Peakflow SP TMS ”): A fully integrated component of the Peakflow SP solution, Peakflow SP TMS conducts surgical mitigation of network and service-layer attacks that threaten your IDC. More specifically:
For HTTP/Web 2.0 applications, Peakflow SP TMS protects a server’s Web services by stopping malformed HTTP packets and rate-limiting HTTP requests caused by illegitimate zombies performing malicious activity such as click fraud.
For Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) traffic, Peakflow SP TMS can help maintain VoIP services by stopping malformed Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) packets and conducting SIP request limiting.
For Domain Name System (DNS) traffic, Peakflow SP TMS can verify proper DNS protocol usage, scrub malformed DNS requests and stop spoofed sources through DNS authentication.
For generic IP-based services, Peakflow SP TMS can conduct packet scrubbing of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) services—looking for attacks using vectors such as: TCP SYN floods, TCP connection resets, TCP idle sessions, and UDP or ICMP floods.
Peakflow SP TMS can also complement and/or protect existing IDC security products. For example, Peakflow SP TMS can be deployed in front of traditional firewalls or intrusion detection and protection systems (IDPSs) and act as a “first line of defense” that helps reduce the load and further optimize the performance of these devices.
3. Arbor Peakflow X (“Peakflow X”): Designed for internal networks, Peakflow X leverages IP flow data and deep packet inspection (DPI) to provide:
Visibility into the applications/services running in your IDC.
The ability to detect internal threats to the IDC, such as botnets, worms, phishing, etc.
Assistance in meeting regulatory obligations established by the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standard, Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), and Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) by ensuring that confidential data is not being accessed or removed from your IDC by unauthorized personnel.
These three products are supported by Arbor’s Security Engineering and Response Team (ASERT). ASERT conducts global threat analysis, maintains a real-time security portal known as the Active Threat Level Analysis System (ATLAS), and provides consultation and security-related services such as the Active Threat Feed (ATF) to Peakflow customers.
Protecting Your Internet Data Center
