Akamai Technologies has opened a new data center in Japan as part of an ongoing expansion of its global network.
When a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a client website is detected, all incoming site traffic is rerouted to one or more of Akamai's global data centers. Malicious traffic is "scrubbed" before the remaining clean traffic is routed back to the client's network. Using this cloud-based approach, Akamai DDoS technicians can mitigate DDoS attacks and bring a client's website back online without significant business disruption.
"This new state-of-the-art data center improves network performance for our clients in Japan while significantly increasing network capacity in the Asia Pacific region," said John Summers, vice president of Security Business Unit at Akamai Technologies. "Locating another scrubbing center in Japan also enables more clients to access Akamai's global DDoS mitigation network."
Operating high capacity, regional DDoS scrubbing centers that are located close to where DDoS attacks originate is a cornerstone of Akamai's DDoS fighting strategy. Over the last 18 months, there has been an increase in DDoS attacks originating from the Asia Pacific region and this trend continued in Q3 2014, as noted in Akamai's State of the Internet Report: Security, which was published on October 23.
The report noted that Q3 was another record-setting quarter for DDoS attacks and showed an 80% increase in average peak bandwidth compared to Q2 2014 and a 389% increase from the same period a year ago (Q3 2013). One factor that has contributed to this increase was a 321 Gigabits per second (Gbps) attack and 16 other attacks that each peaked above 100 Gbps.
The US was the main source of DDoS attacks in Q3, accounting for 24% of all attacks. Countries with emerging and expanding infrastructures were next, including China with 20%, Brazil with 18% and Mexico with 14%. Korea came in fifth with 6%, followed by Germany with 6%, and Japan with 4%. Together, Brazil, Russia, India and China accounted for 43% of DDoS traffic. Countries located in Asia accounted for more than a third of the global DDoS attack traffic with 36%, which can be attributed to a surge in DDoS-related malware.
"With the size of DDoS attacks continuing to grow, Akamai is continuing to add network capacity," said Summers. "The new Japan data center opened in early October, is fully operational, and has already mitigated DDoS attack traffic."
Akamai will continue to expand its network capacity by bringing two new regional data centers online in 2015, one in Asia Pacific (Japan) and one in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
This article first appeared on the Networks Asia website