The Problem

When NimbusDDOS received a request to certify a threat protection hardware appliance, CEO Andrew Shoemaker recognized he couldn't conduct the testing exclusively in their standard test environment. Their existing setup, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), has worked well when testing web services and applications. Shoemaker needed to find a way to quickly expand their test environment to include both a simulated attack surface and the hardware appliance.

Creating a new solution and infrastructure on his own would be too costly and time-consuming. As Shoemaker described, "We knew we needed to be able to tie the customer's equipment into our testing infrastructure but couldn't justify building a costly new deployment."

The Solution

Shoemaker recognized NimbusDDOS needed to work with a local partner that had both colocation and cloud capabilities. After reviewing qualified vendors in the Boston-area, Shoemaker selected Markley as the only vendor that could meet the level of customization and flexibility needed for the certification test.

Markley is New England's first and only AWS Direct Connect location. "AWS Direct Connect at Markley made it easy for us to establish a dedicated, high bandwidth, private network connection from our space at Markley to AWS," stated Shoemaker.

With Markley, NimbusDDOS was able to flexibly deploy a hybrid cloud solution that fully integrated key physical resources, broadband networks and public cloud resources. NimbusDDOS hosted the hardware appliance in the Markley colocation facility and directly connected to its Attack Simulation Platform with AWS Direct Connect.

Shoemaker deployed the DDoS test environment in the Markley Cloud using virtualized Linux servers as attack targets to quickly assemble all the resources needed to conduct the certification.

The Results

Markley's AWS Direct Connect connectivity, mixed with the abundance of Markley's on-premise resources, eliminated the need for NimbusDDOS to purchase additional equipment, keeping testing costs affordable and allowing for project completion in record time.

Conclusion

With Markley's flexible resources, NimbusDDOS was able to complete the testing for the defense effectiveness certification, without sacrificing the quality of the testing. NimbusDDOS ran the threat protection system through a number of DDoS attacks and found that the product could withstand all the required attack vectors.