An old standby of cyber criminals--the denial-of-service attack--has become a new worry for data center operators. As companies increasingly use virtualized data centers and cloud services, new weaknesses have opened up in enterprise infrastructure.
At the same time, denial-of-service attacks are moving from brute-force floods of data to more skillful attacks on application infrastructure.

The combination is increasingly threatening for the companies that are placing critical business data outside their facilities, leaving their business reliant on continuing communications. In addition, with multi-tenant services becoming more common, attacks aimed at one company could dramatically impact the services of an unrelated, but co-located, firm.

"Enterprises continue to cite security and availability as the top barrier to adoption of cloud computing," Rob Ayoub, Global Program Director for Information Security research at Frost & Sullivan said in a statement. "Given these concerns, hosting and other data center operators today must have the ability to mitigate attacks without interrupting customer facing services."

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