A recent paper on distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks by Neustar concludes that only cloud-based DDoS solutions offer a comprehensive defence against increasing attacks that are expected to surge by as much as 40% in 2012.

“Cloud solutions provide the bandwidth (as measured in Gbps) to absorb today’s massive network layer attacks, plus the technology diversity and processing power to handle application-layer and high packets-per-second strikes,” said Neustar.

Neustar agrees that all on-premise hardware, even at best, has limits.  At some point the sheer volume of traffic will clog network connections – before on-premise perimeter equipment even gets involved!

“Network-bandwidth attacks of 10Gbps or more were still 15% of all DDoS incidents Neustar mitigated. More than one out of 10 attacks came with hurricane strength, enough to overwhelm bandwidth and quickly cause an outage.”

Additionally, high packets-per-second (PPS) attacks grew in popularity.

“Instead of exhausting bandwidth, these drain processing …