Posted on October 21, 2022 at 8:46 AM
Microsoft launches Azure DDoS protection for small and mid-sized businesses
Microsoft has announced the launch of the Azure distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection to the public. This protection tool will provide a new and fully managed DDoS protection pay-per-protected IP model. The tool has been created to target small and mid-size businesses.
Microsoft launches DDoS for SMBs
The DDoS service launched by Microsoft offers the same capability as the DDoS Network Protection, initially known as DDoS Protection Standard. The protection tool was created to assist large enterprises and organizations defend their networks.
DDoS attacks have become rampant in recent years. These attacks slow down networks and could cause detrimental harm to an organization. In some instances, DDoS attacks are conducted as part of another attack, such as ransomware, or to give way for the hacker to compromise the network.
This new tool by Microsoft has been equipped with critical capabilities that range from L3/L4 automatic detection of an attack. It also helps to mitigate against attacks, which is an added advantage to critical organizations that would be dealt a major blow in case a DDoS attack happened.
The tool also offers alerts and metrics, mitigation flow logs, and policies customized to customer applications. It also comes with Microsoft Sentinel, Azure Firewall Manager, and Microsoft Defender, that aids in Cloud integration.
The recently launched DDoS IP Protection for SMBs will differ from the enterprise offers. The new tool does not support DDoS rapid response support or cost protection and does not provide discounts on WAF.
The Microsoft Senior Product Manager for Azure Networking, Amir Dahan, commented on this development saying that customers could now use the DDoS IP protection SKU to achieve flexibility in DDoS Protection Services.
“With the DDoS IP Protection SKU, customers now have the flexibility to enable DDoS protection on individual public IP addresses,” Dahan said. “SMB customers who have a few public IP addresses to protect will benefit from this cost-effective DDoS protection option.”
Features of the new DDoS protection system
Dahan went ahead to discuss the key features of DDoS IP Protection. One of the features that he mentioned was the massive mitigation capacity and scale. The tool can help protect workloads against large and sophisticated attacks. Moreover, it uses cloud-scale DDoS Protection services that the global network offered by Azure supports.
The other main feature of the DDoS Protection tool for SMBs is adaptive tuning. It protects applications and resources and lowers the chances of false negatives. Adaptive tuning is also tuned to the scale of the application while supporting the actual traffic patterns.
As aforementioned, the tool also provides attack analytics and tuning metrics. It can monitor DDoS attacks in real-time while providing fast responses to them alongside visibility into how the attack was conducted, vectors, lifecycle, and the mitigation methods that can be used to avert the attack.
The DDoS protection tool for SMBs can also be integrated with the Azure Firewall Manager. This integration provides a central location for managing the DDoS protection services across one’s environment. Moreover, it also comes with network security services that lower the scope of the attack while giving an extra layer of protection.
This tool supports integration with Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for cloud services. This one is yet another critical feature. It helps to strengthen the security system using rich attack analytics. The toll is also telemetry integrated with Microsoft Sentinel while giving security alerts and recommendations that Microsoft Defender offers for Cloud.
The wide array of features offered by this DDoS IP protection for SMBs shows that it has the capability needed to mitigate DDoS attacks while ensuring these attacks are not used to compromise the networks of these businesses.
The DDoS IP Protection can now be used in preview in select regions. Moreover, customers can only enable this protection on Public IP Standard SKU after enrolling for the service.
The SKU can also be configured in the Azure Preview Portal. This will be part of the configuration workflow for Azure DDoS protection. This allows every customer to have a service tailored to their needs.
Microsoft will start billing this new service from February 1, 2023. Moreover, the pricing options for the service can be seen on the Azure DDoS protection pricing page.
