ThreatChaos Security Blog

Content Delivery Networks as weapons of cyber defense

Monday, 04 January 2010 02:29

One benefit of content delivery networks (CDNs) that has always been present is that they are a great way to defend against DDoS. A CDN hosts your content, articles, video, and audio, on a distributed platform, usually globally dispersed, and backed up by lots of bandwidth and load balanced servers. Big content providers like CNN, Youtube, or Revision3 want their material to be served up with minimum delay or pauses. The infrastructure required to deliver that content happens to be very good at keeping a site up during a denial of service attack.
Akamai, the largest CDN, has recently started to market security services as well as their content delivery capability. In the latest Threatcast I interview Andy Ellis, Akamai’s Senior Director of Information Security and Chief Security Architect.
Check out Akamai’s new security page on their site. I like their tag line: “Turn your IT department into a Defense department with cloud-based security.” In addition to DDoS protection Akamai offers web application security which is a nice fit.

Listen to Andy Ellis in the ThreatCast hosted by MiTechNews, in partnership with IT-Harvest.
As DDoS attacks become more prevalent it is good to see service providers who understand that security sells, a common theme here at ThreatChaos.