TRENDING
“
THESE DAYS,
ATTACKERS
MAY FIND
THEMSELVES
WITH EXTRA TIME
ON THEIR HANDS.
For businesses facing these issues, it’s critical
that your application services can meet
the new levels of demand. Can you handle
peak loads or does infrastructure need to be
upgraded? Can cloud-bursting help alleviate
the challenges caused by dramatic spikes in
use? Can traffic or web workloads be split
to quickly deploy new virtual application
delivery instances for failover and continuity?
What about staffing shortages when
employees must shelter-in-place or worse, fall
ill? In these types of scenarios, it’s critical that
your infrastructures employ automation and
cross-infrastructure visibility via a Polynimbus
secure application services strategy.
We have already seen customers in the
financial services, education and technology
sectors having to pivot rapidly to fortify their
infrastructures as millions of workers go home.
Protecting the network from attacks
If early reports are any indication,
cyberattackers are finding renewed
motivation and new targets to launch
distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
These days, attackers may find themselves
with extra time on their hands.
Business resources are more essential than
ever to help keep us connected. All sectors:
technology (including all of those apps
providing delivery services), education
and especially those critical sectors
like government, financial services and
healthcare must be protected to ensure
this conduit is uninterrupted when
everything else is.
Gunter Reiss, Vice President of Worldwide
Marketing at A10 Networks
Embracing Artificial Intelligence/Machine
Learning and automation can help find
known and unknown attacks in realtime.
Combining these capabilities with
actionable threat intelligence is especially
important with the on-going shortage
in security expertise. This may become
compounded by the disruption to personnel
for COVID-19 preparedness.
Will the pandemic speed the
adoption of 5G?
There are mixed indicators as to whether the
pandemic will speed the adoption or slow it
down due to the global economic fall-out.
However, one thing is for certain, shelter-inplace
orders are having a dramatic impact
on how people are connecting with each
other. What were once in-person exercise
classes, religious services and cocktail hours
are moving to virtual.
As Terry Young explains in a blog post
about the adoption of 5G in the time of
a pandemic, service providers are, to no
surprise, experiencing a surge in network
traffic. 5G has the potential to make these
virtual connections better with its promised
ultra-reliable low-latency capability.
What must service providers consider
during these times? Do you have sufficient
IP addresses in your IPv4 or IPv6 pools
and sufficient capacity to handle
the increased demand in traffic and
subscribers? Is your network protected
against DDoS attacks? Can you effectively
steer more critical services or temporarily
give them higher priority?
Many service providers, such as Vodafone,
are augmenting capacity to meet the higher
peak traffic demand.
Preventing cyber foul play
Not surprisingly, cybercriminals are using the
global crisis to launch new attacks at new
targets. Since the start of the pandemic in
late 2019, we have seen different attacks,
ranging from attackers targeting the
World Health Organisation (WHO) to steal
information to mass phishing email and
spam campaigns targeting remote workers.
We have even seen cases where
cybercriminals are launching websites
with domain names related to coronavirus
and COVID-19, exploiting people’s
curiosity or worry to eventually launch
ransomware attacks.
Now, more than ever, organisations must
take a ‘trust nobody’ approach to security.
As Babur Khan explains in his blog post
about preventing cyberattacks, organisations
of all kinds must take a Zero Trust approach.
Make sure that no user has access to data
that they don’t depend on for their day-today
functions. Restrict access as much as
possible. Ensure that you have visibility into
all your users, traffic, data and workloads
and that you have uniform security policies
applied across all locations to make sure no
security loopholes exist.
We are in the midst of a global event such
as we have not seen in recent memory.
It is requiring all of us to retool, revamp
and readjust again and again. It is a time
to re-evaluate your critical infrastructure
and security practices to ensure they
are fortified to the level required for the
network traffic and cyberattacks we
are experiencing and will continue to
experience in the months ahead. •
“
IT IS A TIME TO
RE-EVALUATE
YOUR CRITICAL
INFRASTRUCTURE
AND SECURITY
PRACTICES.
20 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com