Immedion Maintains Always-On, Secure Data Centers, Stops DDoS Attacks with Kentik

Overview

Businesses of all sizes are increasingly reliant on cloud and data center providers that host their mission-critical applications and data. With bad actors constantly looking for opportunities to disrupt or penetrate those providers’ networks, real-time network visibility and threat alerting are imperative. That’s why Immedion chose Kentik to help maintain high customer satisfaction and provide always-on, accessible, secure services.

Situation

Immedion is a cloud, data center, and managed services provider based in Greenville, South Carolina. Founded in 2007, the company has grown to operate seven data center facilities in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Ohio. As a competitive advantage, Immedion remains committed to providing the same fast, secure, always-on enterprise-level solutions of a national cloud and data center provider, combined with the hands-on attention and agility of a local business. As Immedion noticed substantially higher global DDoS activity over the last several years, the company knew it needed to deploy a network monitoring platform to stop these new threats. More specifically, Immedion needed real-time detection and visibility across all of its growing data center facilities to help maintain its commitment to highly available and secure services – and ultimately sustain its high level of customer satisfaction.

Solution

Immedion quickly determined that flow-based analytics would be the most effective way to enhance network performance across all seven of its sites while detecting and mitigating DDoS attacks in real time. The company evaluated several commercial network monitoring solutions and set up four proofs-of-concept (PoCs). During the PoC process, Immedion found that most on-premises solutions required data-collector platforms to be deployed at each of its seven sites. That would require significant resources to setup and manage. “As we evaluated our options, most products didn’t meet our stringent requirements,” said David Johnson, director of network engineering at Immedion. “Kentik reached out to us just as our other PoCs were coming to an end. With a SaaS-based network performance monitoring platform, Kentik offered DDoS detection and mitigation capabilities, and was just what we were looking for.” “In our PoC of Kentik, we quickly found we could query our network data within seconds compared to the minutes or hours that other solutions we evaluated required,” added Johnson. “The platform is super simple, with no installations and no additional manpower required to operate it.” Within two days of purchasing the Kentik platform, Immedion had it deployed across all seven of its data center facilities.

Results

With Kentik, Immedion is able to maintain always-on, highly-available data centers. Specific results include:

Real-Time Visibility and Security Across Seven Facilities

Immedion was very quickly able to achieve its goal of greater network visibility and DDoS protection using Kentik. “With custom dashboards built into the solution, we had new visibility from Kentik from day-one of our deployment,” said Johnson. With the 30-40 Gbps-DDoS attacks observed on its networks, Immedion now uses the Kentik platform to automate attack detection and mitigation. Immedion leverages Kentik’s remotely triggered black-hole (RTBH) routing, which enables its team to enforce blacklist routing policies from a centralized station to any of its seven facilities, with automation to drop malicious traffic before it causes an outage. “We set up one of Kentik’s APIs to interact with our customer support ticketing system to get alerted to DDoS attacks targeting our customers, and the capabilities of the API are powerful,” said Johnson. “Understanding the business impact of DDoS attacks, as well as Kentik’s capabilities to stop them, some of our executives have now asked to be included on these automated tickets to see the impressive results firsthand.”

Significant Time and Cost Savings

“When we reviewed total cost of ownership (TCO) of Kentik, we found that it would only take about three years until a break-even point,” said Johnson. “In comparison, other technologies would take many more years but provide less scale.” “When you factor in ongoing support and maintenance, which we knew would require between eight to 10 hours per week for the cumbersome on-premise solutions, we have also saved weeks out of the year of our team’s time by going with Kentik’s easy-to-use platform,” he added.

Commitment to Service-Level Agreements

Immedion’s main goal in deploying a network monitoring solution was to stop DDoS attacks and other threats from hindering its network performance, straining its customer relationships and impacting service-level agreements (SLAs). “With Kentik, we don’t fear the sheer volume in DDoS attacks that now exist,” said Johnson. “Kentik has allowed us to demonstrate robust network availability to our customers and stand behind our SLAs.”

Key Takeaway

“As a growing data center provider, we implemented Kentik Detect on our seven sites in two days and automated DDoS detection and mitigation across all of our sites within a month. Having worked with other DDoS solutions in my past, Kentik is a welcome addition to the flow analytics and DDoS attack protection solution options on the market,” said Johnson. “From our perspective, Kentik is unparalleled in the industry when it comes to performance, scalability, efficiency, and cost.”