Sharktech LA data centre
Sharktech LA data centre

Sharktech has strengthened their DDoS offering with a partnership announcement with both China Unicom and China Telecom. The announcement issues last week is the culmination of work first mooted in June 2015.

Sharktech offer DDoS Protection using geographically diverse centres but have specialised on Asia facing services. They are looking to bring a fourth data centre online in Amsterdam, Netherlands soon to add to the its three US based sites in Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago. It’s Los Angeles site that is the best connected with six upstream peering agreements with the following six telcos:

  1. Comcast
  2. Zayo (Above.net)
  3. GTT (Tiscali & nLayer)
  4. Cogent
  5. China Unicom
  6. China Telecom

The latest two telcos, China Telecom and China Unicom, will help protect customers further and should see an increase in speed through its routes to Asia. DDoS protection is just one of the security headaches that CISO face and mitigating the risk caused by them is important. We do not yet know what caused the hack into Carphone Warehouse but back in 2014 Sony spent more than $170 million in their clean up operation of a DDoS attack that lasted over a month.

DDoS attacks often shield more directed attacks and in some cases weaken protection. Ensuring that the DDoS shield is separated from the servers is important and Sharktech operate a multi tier defence for customers. Some DDoS attacks have seen throughput of more than 15 Gbits/sec and Sharktech splits this amongst their Data centres to lessen the load and allow normal traffic to continue.

Tim Timrawi : CEO & Founder of Sharktech Inc.
Tim Timrawi : CEO & Founder of Sharktech Inc.

This latest reaction is in light of increasing connectivity in Asia and the increase in businesses wishing to work in the region. Sharktech President Tim Timrawi commenting on the reasons behind this latest move said: “We find that servers in the US and China are most frequently targeted by DDoS attacks… China, and Asia at large, consistently rely on Sharktech DDoS-protected transit to service their customers. With the addition of our two new premier transit providers, the routes are even faster.”

As Sony has already discovered and others no doubt will, a DDoS attack doesn’t just impact sales for an hour, day or week. Nor is it just an IT problem it is a business problem. Timrawi was keen to stress: “DDoS attacks were once considered to be an IT problem but they now reverberate and can cause significant brand damage that affects all organizational employees and customers,”

Coming to Europe

The primary purpose of this announcement from Sharktech is merely the addition of two major Chinese networks to its portfolio of partners. That traffic from and to China is increasing this is an important but obvious step from Sharktech. The reference to the Amsterdam data centre is more interesting and may see Sharktech seeking to operate in Europe.

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