Huawei Helps Netherlands' Serverius Data Centers Reverse the Operation Dilemma

About the Customer

It also has the world's largest harbor to support international trade, and was one of the great maritime nations of the 17th century. More recently, the Netherlands has also occupied an important position in the cyber world, which has seen rapid development since the 20th century. Amsterdam is one of backbone network nodes in Europe. Thanks to the open and free cultural background and unique geographical and network resources, the Netherlands attracts the investment of companies from all over the world. It is one of the two data center hotspot areas in Europe and has many multinational companies and hundreds of business data centers.

As a data center operator, Serverius is a latecomer in the Netherlands, which is one of the lowest countries in the world, with one third of its land area below sea level. If a data center is built below sea level, the risk of seawater ingress greatly increases. Yet the cost of building and operating a data center above sea level is much higher. The two data centers of Serverius are built above sea level and support intra-city remote disaster recovery and backup, greatly improving reliability. Serverius' two data centers in Amsterdam are directly connected to European backbone nodes in Frankfurt to provide fast transmission services. This is why Serverius' business has been growing rapidly in recent years, with the data center provider now among the top 5 in the Netherlands and serving more than 2000 enterprise customers worldwide. Indeed, it has become a rising star in the local data center industry.

Challenges to Serverius Continuous Security Challenges

Cyber attacks on the Internet are a constant menace. In recent years, cyber attacks are increasingly rampant. DDoS attack has been a hotspot of network security because of its low cost and difficult defense. With the advent of the AI era, the frequency of global DDoS attacks keeps increasing. In 2023, the frequency of attacks increases by 1.6 times year-on-year, and the number of attacks exceeding 800 Gbit/s reaches 248. DDoS attacks have become one of the biggest threats to network security.Since 2013, customer services have been attacked almost on a daily basis. O&M personnel are busy handling network attack events, resulting in longer working hours, higher O&M costs, more customer complaints, higher customer churn, and eventually, lower revenue.

Solution Analyze the Situation and Quickly Find the Right Approach to Security

Serverius analyzed its operation status and network security events and found that 100% of lost customers had encountered or complained about network attacks. For example, a loyal customer of many years with an annual sales volume of over EUR1,000,000 experienced multiple DDoS attacks within a month, resulting in severe losses. Finally, the customer ended the cooperation with Serverius. To resolve the problem, Serverius communicated with other well-known data center operators, and found out that those whose revenues increased rapidly in recent years were providing security as value-added services, which not only protected customer service continuity from frequent security events, but also improved competitiveness and consequently revenue in this highly competitive industry. In the Netherlands, less than 15% of data center operators were providing security operation services, and the service quality needed improvements. Serverius quickly planned its own security protection operation solution with the following capabilities:

• The solution must be a combination of basic operable protection schemes that can be customized and quickly integrated with the existing operations platform of Serverius.

• The protection must be effective without compromising user service experience, and refined security policies can be customized for different customers or applications. Effective defense measures must be provided to defend against application-layer CC attacks and emerging attacks.

• The solution must be scalable and schedulable to reduce O&M costs and adapt to the fast-growing services.

Serverius has its own operation platform — Toolbox — which is used to schedule and configure its servers, networks, and services, as well as generate reports. Therefore, the security protection solution must be quickly integrated into the platform and managed by Toolbox. The security solution involves multiple security protection layers — including network security, application security, and data security — each requiring a unique security solution and set of O&M skills.

DDoS attacks are one of the most common types of attacks threatening the service continuity of data centers. Such attacks can be easily perceived by customers, and mature protection measures are available in the industry. Based on industry practices, customer demands, and available technical personnel, Serverius eventually selected the anti-DDoS security protection and operation service as a starting point for its data center security protection business. Serverius then communicated with well-known anti-DDoS vendors, performed proof of concept (POC) tests, and determined the solution deployment plan.

Eventually, Huawei's anti-DDoS solution stood out for its deployment flexibility, powerful protection performance, and accurate protection capabilities.

Customer Benefits

Since the deployment of Huawei's anti-DDoS solution, the time spent on handling security events has been reduced considerably. The data protection report showed that in the first year, Huawei's anti-DDoS solution successfully blocked over 40,000 DDoS attacks, with peak attack traffic reaching hundreds of Gbit/s. More importantly, this solution helps Serverius grow in both the user base and revenue, far exceeding Serverius' expectations.