Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 04 | Page 52

INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres “WHILE WEB SERVERS HAVE BEEN AT THE RECEIVING END OF DDOS ATTACKS FOR YEARS, ATTACKERS ARE NOW EXPLOITING WEB APPLICATION VULNERABILITIES TO TURN WEB SERVERS INTO “BOTS”.” At a glance… EMEA Big Data data centre infrastructure market to triple by 2019 DNS servers offline is an easy way for attackers to keep thousands or millions of Internet subscribers from accessing the Internet. If attackers incapacitate an ISP’s DNS servers, they can prevent the ISP’s subscribers from resolving domain names, visiting websites, sending email and using other vital Internet services. DNS attacks have brought down service providers’ DNS services for hours, even days, and in extreme cases have led to class-action lawsuits by subscribers. SSL-induced security blind spots To prevent the continuous stream of malware and intrusions in their networks, enterprises need to inspect incoming and outgoing traffic for threats. Unfortunately, attackers are increasingly turning to encryption to evade detection. With more and more applications supporting SSL – in fact, over 40% of applications can use SSL or change ports– SSL encryption represents not just a chink in enterprises’ proverbial armour, but an enormous crater that malicious actors can exploit. While many firewalls, intrusion prevention and threat prevention products can decrypt SSL traffic, they can’t keep pace with growing SSL encryption demands. Brute force and weak authentication Applications often use authentication to verify the identity of users. With authentication, application owners can restrict access to authorised users and they can customise content based on user identity. Unfortunately, many application owners only enforce singlefactor, password-based authentication. With weak single-factor authentication, application owners are exposed to a host of threats, from simple password guessing and stolen credentials to highly automated brute force attacks from password cracking tools. (For the full article, please visit www.intelligentcio.com/me) 52 INTELLIGENTCIO International Data Corporation (IDC) has completed an indepth market sizing of the EMEA Big Data infrastructure market focusing on servers, storage, and cloud resources used for Big Data–related activities. These include value creation from merging different data sources, various analytics, log files, and metadata that help identify patterns and generate predictions. IDC forecasts that Big Data–related server shipments will increase from 6% of all servers shipped in EMEA in 2015 to 16% by 2019, and server values from $1 billion in 2015 to $2.7 billion by 2019. Big Data storage capacity share of new shipments is expected to reach 20 exabytes by 2019, with a value of $2.7 billion. According to our market sizing, 134,000 server units were shipped for Big Data purposes in 2015, and 764 petabytes of storage capacity deployed, with the majority being external storage. While most current Big Data projects are starting off in companies’ own data centres, analytics workloads are increasingly being moved to the public cloud while sensitive data needs to remain on-premises in many cases for compliance reasons. IDC expects the public cloud infrastructure share of Big Data workloads to increase from 13% of server shipments in 2015 to 34% by 2019, and new storage capacity deployed on public cloud infrastructure to increase from 25% of Big Data workloads in 2015 to 55% by 2019. Most customers are expected to deploy some form of hybrid solution. www.intelligentcio.com