How to use NFV to Guard your “Environment”?

Believe it or not, we live in SDN/NFV era, as the famous clause says: “Software is EATING the world” seems to be funny, but it is actually happening …

 

Baed on that, How can we use SDN/NFV to secure the network from DDoS attacks? In series of articles we will discuss how to secure the network from external Distributed Denial of Services “DDoS” attacks  using virtualisation and automation.

 

The series of articles will covers the following

  1. Problem definition
  2. Requirements
  3. Architecture
  4. Components
  5. Mitigation strategy
  6. Test cases and tools used
  7. Tests outcome
  8. Conclusion
  9. Moving forward

 

Problem Definition

 

With new trends in networks, and billions of devices connected – with an exponential increase in number of connected devices mainly due to IoT – many networks are under serious threat of being confronted with an advanced DDoS attack using up to few hundred thousand of devices.

 

Currently many companies spend huge amount of resources to secure their assets, this includes money, people, and processes to assure their valuable assets are as safe as the current technologies allow them to be.

 

It is common to have multiple modules (like WAN, Internet, Core, DC, and Campus) with most critical modules secured by Firewalls, IPS, anti-virus, SIEM and other security tools.

 

These expensive devices require a growing number of resources to manage and operate, also monitoring and fine tuning in case of attacks.

 

So, with all above investment in hardware if you don’t have the right skills and processes; your company’s assets maybe under a great risk.

 

NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) can provide an aid to mitigate this risk, and help to solve this problem.

 

 

Requirements

 

 

The main purpose of this series of articles is to explain how can we use NFV to mitigate the risk of DDoS attack.

In the upcoming articles, we will dive through the solution architecture, the test-bed we used to simulate our solution, and the results and graphs about mitigating DDoS attack on a simulated network using NFV.

 

In the next article, we will illustrate Solution Architecture, Components and Mitigation Strategy.

 

Stay tuned …