Critical services protection

Maintaining business continuity is more important than ever, and being able to demonstrate that appropriate business continuity measures are not just in place, but regularly tested and refined, is a funding requirement for the majority of organisations in the education and research sectors.*

Attacks on the sector are increasing in number and level of sophistication, so it’s important to take a layered approach to defending your core business systems.

As part of your Janet Network connection, Jisc provides a foundation level of DDoS mitigation. This provides mitigation against DDoS attacks on your Janet connection, helping to maintain connectivity to the online world, including cloud hosted resources that may be crucial to your business operations.  We also offer the option to upgrade to Foundation Plus, providing 24/7 automated protection against Jisc detected volumetric DDoS attacks.

But what about the key services that sit within your network but may be vulnerable to external DDoS attacks, such as your web or DNS servers, telephony services, finance systems or firewalls? Recently we have seen a spike in DNS flood attacks and we can help mitigate this type of attack with Jisc's critical services protection.

Critical services protection adds an additional layer of defence to help you ‘keep the lights on’ and maintain business continuity. By choosing critical services protection, you can show you’re doing what you can to maintain access to business-critical services, helping you to maintain your organisation’s reputation and protect the bottom line.

The affordable service offers out-of-hours coverage, customisable protection of your externally-facing services and fast DDoS mitigation response times that can prevent interruptions to your business operations. It can be provided 24/7 all year round, or at critical times, such as clearing, the start of the academic year or during peak operating months. Please ask us about our short- and long-term protection options.

Critical services protection is available with a choice of response times:

• “fast” – a slight delay as alerts are triggered before the mitigation starts
• “instant” - permanent/always on mitigation protection with no delay in mitigation

By reacting quickly to a DDoS attack, critical services protection reduces the window of time in which an attack can disrupt your services.

These protections are specifically scoped and tailored to your requirements with a choice of pre-configured profiles (ADFS, DNS, SIP, VPN, web) or bespoke profiles such as firewalls. If you select a bespoke option, this gives you access to in-depth reporting via our cyber security portal.

Jisc also provides a cloud web application firewall, which protects your website from emerging threats and helps achieve compliance needs.

Taking a layered approach to cyber security is the best way to achieve defence in depth. Contact us to arrange a call to learn more about critical services protection and our range of services that help maintain business continuity, keeping your customers and stakeholders satisfied and meeting the requirements of your funding bodies.

*Education and Skills Funding Agency require evidence that business continuity and disaster recovery plans and procedures are in place, regularly tested and conform to ISO22301 Security and resilience – Business continuity management systems.

Part of a suite of security services

Critical services protection is part of our suite of security services. These are designed to defend the Janet Network, to protect your organisation, and to help you to protect your organisation yourself.

Cyber security portal

Gain insight to your network security delivered via Janet, including DDoS mitigation data, via our cyber security portal. Your dashboard provides information about your network traffic in relation to DDoS attacks, alerts and in-progress or past mitigations.