Azure will now protect SMBs from DDoS attacks
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Microsoft has announced (opens in new tab) that a new SKU for its cloud computing platform Azure’s DDoS Protection offering, which it says is designed specifically with SMBs in mind, is now in public preview.
The latest SKU, called “IP Protection”, is built to defend against L3/L4 DDoS attacks through “always-on monitoring and adaptive tuning”.
According to Microsoft, IP Protection integrates with other Azure services such as Azure Firewall Manager, Microsoft Sentinel, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud to provide real-time alerts and statistics to enable protection for a single public IP address.
The new Azure DDoS SKU
Prices will vary by region (opens in new tab)but IP protection will be significantly less expensive than Microsoft’s business-oriented “Network Protection” tier if you have fewer than 15 public IP resources to protect.
For users in the Central US region, IP protection costs about $199 / £172 per month per protected public IP resource.
By contrast, enterprises will have to pay as much as $2,944/£2,542 per month for each DDoS protection plan they sign up for, a potential barrier to reducing cloud costs.
IP Protection is currently in preview in selected regions of the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific, including West and Central India.
You can view the new solution by visiting the Azure Preview portal (opens in new tab)while Microsoft claims a release for the mainline Azure Portal won’t be too far behind.
The news comes as DDoS attacks, in which would-be hackers try to flood the attacked machine’s website with countless unnecessary requests to try and overload it, making it inaccessible to users, remain extremely common.
TechRadar Pro reported earlier in October that there has been a 90% increase in DDoS attacks since Q3 2021, according to research from StormWall.
Of all the sectors surveyed, telecommunications was by far the hardest hit, accounting for almost 43.2% of all incidents, a sevenfold increase year-on-year.