News Feature | March 11, 2015

Survey: 85% Of Services Providers Experienced Customer Churn After DDoS Attack

Christine Kern

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Survey: 85% Of Services Providers Experienced Customer Churn After DDoS Attack

A new study released by Black Lotus, a provider of DDoS (distributed denial of service) protection, reveals 85 percent of services providers have experienced customer churn as a result of DDoS attacks. According to “DDoS Attacks: The Service Provider Impact,” the top three areas with between 10 to 25 percent churn as a result of attacks are managed hosting solutions (MHS), 56 percent of survey respondents; Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), 55 percent: and Infrastructure-as-a-Services (IaaS), 48 percent. In addition, 79 percent of PaaS providers, 77 percent of IaaS providers, and 75 percent of MHS providers report they see DDoS as a threat to their business. 

While almost all participants (92 percent) have some form of DDoS protection in place, it is insufficient to stop an attack before damage is done. According to the survey’s corresponding infographic, just 16 percent of providers surveyed reported never or rarely experiencing a DDoS attack, while 35 percent of those surveyed reported one or more attacks per week. The top three industries with customers affected by DDoS attacks at least once a month were MHS, VolP, and PaaS.

The 129 survey respondents represented companies of all sizes; the largest group represented in the survey was small companies of 1 to 999 employees worldwide (52 percent of all companies surveyed), with organizations of fewer than 250 employees (20 percent) as the largest subgroup. Respondents included IT-related administrators (65 percent), network administrators (13 percent), and IT-related directors (10 percent).

Shawn Marck, co-founder and chief security officer of Black Lotus, comments, “DDoS attacks will continue to grow in scale and severity thanks to increasingly powerful (and readily available) attack tools, the multiple points of Internet vulnerability and increased dependence on the Internet. Enterprises have to move from thinking of DDoS as a possibility, to treating it as an eventuality.”