Corero > Case Studies > Liquid Web Tackles DDoS Challenges with Corero Solution

Liquid Web Tackles DDoS Challenges with Corero Solution

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

Corero DDoS solution
Corero appliance

Tech Stack

DDoS mitigation
Network security

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Cybersecurity & Privacy - Network Security

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Use Cases

Cybersecurity

Services

System Integration
Testing & Certification

About The Customer

Liquid Web Inc. is a privately held managed web hosting and datacenter company founded in 1997. It operates three wholly owned datacenters in Lansing, Michigan, and a fourth location in Scottsdale, Arizona. The company fills a niche in the public cloud space focused on providing premium web hosting capabilities upmarket from traditional shared hosting. It currently has 25,000–30,000 customers and has been named one of the Inc. 5000 fastest-growing companies for the past 10 years. Liquid Web support teams are certified by Cisco and Red Hat and available onsite at each of the datacenters on a 24 x 7 basis. The company's 400 support engineers have specialties in technical support, server setup, database administration, advanced networking, security, migrations, system restoration, and other areas.

The Challenge

Liquid Web Inc., a managed web hosting and datacenter company, was facing a significant increase in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, affecting its core business. These attacks could be either volumetric or nonvolumetric in nature. The company had an existing solution in place from a security provider that was used for attack detection. However, that solution was not doing enough to deal with mounting DDoS problems. When DDoS attacks were made on the Liquid Web network, incidents needed to be identified, isolated, and mitigated. Before Liquid Web onboarded the Corero solution, such attacks were routinely detected but not prevented. Another challenge was that 'innocent bystanders' (i.e., other customers on the network) could be impacted by a network slowdown even though they weren't the specific target of a DDoS attack.

The Solution

After a lengthy evaluation process, the IT implementation team opted for a hybrid scenario. The hybrid scenario involved keeping the company's existing on-premise solution, which had been traditionally used for detection. The plan was to add a Corero DDoS solution, which would be used in a complementary fashion by adding an automatic mitigation capability. This approach gave the company a multilayer DDoS mitigation strategy that prevented illicit traffic from entering the network while the existing solution continued to be used for detection and mitigation. One of the key justifications for this approach was the avoidance of false positives. If traffic is blocked as a result of a false positive, customers will be irate. Establishing the right mix, therefore, is a key success factor for the company.

Operational Impact

Decreased incidence of DDoS attacks and improved customer satisfaction.
The 24 x 7 security operations team indicated that it needed more staff because of time spent processing so many security incidents. As a result of the Corero implementation and the ability to reduce the incidence of DDoS attacks, personnel could focus on other key aspects of customer-related security issues such as virus- and malware-related incidents.
Corero established a security operations center (SOC) support offering. This involved providing first-level support, monitoring attacks that were being blocked, and alerting the security team when events had occurred.

Quantitative Benefit