Why Load Balancers Should be Part of Your Security Architecture
Here’s why load balancers are essential for your security architecture.
Although load balancers are recognized as integral to IT infrastructure, organizations must also see them as essential to security architecture. Larry Goldman, director of product marketing at Progress, shares why load balancers should be part of a company’s defense against cyberattacks.
In the early days of the Internet, the rise of load balancers could be attributed to one objective: Optimizing the growing use of PC servers. Thanks in part to the introduction of cloud and hybrid applications, today’s IT infrastructure landscape has changed dramatically—and so has the technological sophistication of load balancers.
With hybrid cloud driving most of today’s load balancing and application delivery controller (ADC) strategies, organizations should take a unified approach to load balancers across their data centers and public cloud environments.
A major element of that unified approach? Security. In a recent report, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), 89% of IT teams said they have already identified load balancers as a critical part of overall enterprise security architecture. However, adjacent teams like NetOps and DevOps—as well as their CIOs—must also see load balancers as integral to security to adequately protect their organizations against cyberattacks.
Read on to learn more about load balancers and the value they bring to security architecture.
The Rise of Cloud Computing – And Cyberattacks
For organizations looking to efficiently use and scale applications and services at a low cost, cloud computing is a great way to go. Cloud computing offers businesses several benefits, including speed, enhanced performance, improved productivity and greater reliability.
While moving away from physical servers and traditional data centers allow organizations more flexibility, this shift also opens them up to new vulnerabilities. Cybercriminals can easily take advantage of the removal of traditional network security barriers with cloud technology, allowing them to more easily access shared infrastructure and cloud systems data.
A common type of cloud computing cyberattack is a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack. In these kinds of attacks, a perpetrator overwhelms an online service, network resource or host machine in order to make them unavailable to their intended users.
DDoS attacks are not only frustrating; they’re also costly and difficult to prevent. And they’re on the rise: According to Infosecurity Magazine, there was a 74% YoY increase in the number of DDoS attacks in 2022.
To defend themselves against DDoS attacks, organizations need a layered defense strategy. A layered defense strategy uses several protection methods at different points in a network. With this approach, the protection delivered by one layer can compensate for a weakness or flaw in another layer.
For example, businesses can turn to their cloud service providers for protection against DDoS attacks that happen at the network layer, but these providers may not be able to adequately protect against more targeted attacks at the application layer. To ensure they’re better protected, organizations need to incorporate other lines of defense into their security models. The solution? Load balancers.
Bolster Security with Load Balancers
While load balancers are often thought to be the same as ADCs, there is one critical difference between the two: security.
“As application security requirements diversify, vendors consolidate a variety of security functions onto load balancers, rebranding them as ADC platforms, including web application firewalls and DDoS protection,” EMA said in its report.
Load balancers are the perfect addition to a layered security model. In a DDoS attack at the application layer, a perpetrator attempts to overwhelm application servers with a request that may not be detected by a cloud service provider’s network and DDoS protection.
Load balancers offer an extra layer of protection against DDoS attacks by rerouting traffic between servers if a particular server becomes vulnerable. Load balancers can help remove single points of failure, minimize the attack surface and make it more difficult to exhaust resources and saturate links. Additionally, load balancers are both less costly and less strenuous to maintain than hardware defenses, which require regular and extensive upkeep.
Despite the many benefits load balancers can have on DDoS protection, not enough organizations are utilizing them in this way. The EMA report found that most businesses are currently using four security functions in their ADCs: Web application firewalls (71%), VPN concentrators (64%), SSL/TLS decryption (54%) and single sign-on gateway functionality (52%).
Just 45% reported using DDoS protection, but members of the security group were more likely to report using it. So, when security is involved in designing an ADC strategy, they enable DDoS protection on these platforms.
To build layered security models that can thwart attempted DDoS attacks, all relevant teams in an organization must recognize the importance of load balancers.
See More: Web Application Firewall Goes Hybrid to Amp Up DDoS Defenses
Emphasizing the Importance of Load Balancers Across the Organization
In the EMA report, most of the IT professionals surveyed consider ADCs to be a part of overall security architecture. However, NetOps and DevOps teams may not see ADCs and load balancers as critical to security. With these teams working together on a multi-cloud architecture, they should support making ADCs and load balancers an essential element in their security strategy.
The report also found that hybrid cloud adoption is driving load balancing and ADC strategies for 57% of IT organizations. The hybrid cloud allows organizations to deploy and scale new applications and services in the public cloud quickly and at a low cost. At the same time, hybrid cloud architecture keeps other applications, application components and information in the private cloud or on-premises for privacy, security, or performance.
For these reasons, more and more organizations are turning to hybrid cloud architecture. By adopting a hybrid cloud infrastructure, most organizations should also take a unified approach to the technology that spans their data centers and public cloud environments.
To meet the demands of hybrid cloud architectures and cloud-native applications, IT organizations will need to modernize their load-balancing architecture. A cohesive, cross-team method will be the best way to integrate and maintain load balancers within a security model—and the best way to curb attacks like DDoS.
Cybercriminals don’t discriminate – everyone is susceptible to attacks. Just as technology infrastructure is constantly evolving, so too are cyberattacks. Staying ahead of cybercrime will require organizations to continually develop sophisticated defense strategies, and load balancers must play a critical role in those plans going forward.
How are you bolstering your defense against cybercriminals? Are load balancers of help? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We’d love to know!
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