Reinforced protection against cyber attacks

Systems providing protection from DDoS [1] attacks identify dangerous traffic and divert it, so that it never even reaches the data centre. Axians and Windcloud decided to use a solution from Corero Network Security, a leading supplier. The network specialists configured the system in accordance with Windcloud’s requirements.

“The DDoS protection is very important for our clients and a key security concern. That’s why we wanted to get that organised first”, says Stephan Sladek, Windcloud’s CTO. “Now we can use it as a selling point, making it clear that while we may be a small, new supplier, we use the same technology as big data centres.”

New routing infrastructure

Building up a routing infrastructure that spreads loads across several carriers is a complex task, and the centre’s Enge-Sande location is far removed from the major backbones. Axians planned the architecture, which consists of two Juniper Networks routers, and configured these in such a way that they can manage hundreds of thousands of IP addresses and dispatch traffic through different networks by the fastest possible route.

Implementation of the redundancy concept and the scalable routing infrastructure constituted an important step towards the realisation of that Windcloud vision. Jan Peter Schneider, the account manager at Axians, explains: “The connection is established via many different pathways and internet providers. All must be able to connect with the data centre. This means that the network concept should be so structured that there are as few latencies as possible.”

“Green” data centers

The digital transformation is resulting in much progress but at the same time drives up the electricity consumption and carbon dioxide emissions of data centres. For example, its data centre in Enge-Sande relies exclusively on renewable energy sources for its power supply, which is drawn mainly from nearby wind farms.

[*] Distributed denial of service: an occasion when a computer network or website is intentionally prevented from working correctly, by a very large number of users sending data at the same time. A DDoS is a cyber-attack where the perpetrator uses several, often thousands of, unique IP addresses.

Source: Agence nationale française de la sécurité des systèmes d’information.