In 2016, Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, and PCCW Global, the international operating division of HKT, announced a partnership to offer cloud-based anti-DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) security products to enterprises.
Under the arrangement, Alibaba Cloud’s anti-DDoS products were to be sold and distributed to international business customers through PCCW Global.
The problem: bigger and more complex DDoS attacks
A DDoS attack uses many systems at once to flood the access capacity of a target. At the time of the announcement, Alibaba Cloud said such attacks had grown in frequency, size and complexity in recent years. Enterprises with public-facing services, especially those handling high traffic, were exposed to them.
Alibaba Cloud pointed to its own experience as evidence of its capability. On 20 December 2014 it said it defended a gaming app company against a DDoS attack that lasted 14 hours and peaked at 453.8 gigabits per second. It described this as one of the largest cyberattacks in the world.
It also cited the load on its platform during Alibaba Group’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival in 2015. The peak was more than 140,000 orders per second, which the company offered as validation of its security reliability under heavy traffic.
What the products were meant to do
The companies said the products would protect against all types of DDoS threats, including complex layer 7 attacks aimed at applications. The service was automatic and cloud-based. It monitored for compliance violations and security breaches and gave customers real-time visibility of threats.
PCCW Global planned to combine the Alibaba Cloud products with its own threat identification systems. Marc Halbfinger, its chief executive in 2016, said this would give enterprises a more complete view of their security needs.
The players and why they moved
The two companies already worked together. Since June 2015 they had cooperated on network and Internet Data Center (IDC) services in Hong Kong. The anti-DDoS agreement extended that relationship from infrastructure to security, and from Hong Kong to international customers.
Each side brought a different asset. Alibaba Cloud supplied the security technology and the experience of running a large-scale cloud platform. PCCW Global supplied international network expertise and an enterprise customer base. Sicheng Yu, Alibaba Group vice president and general manager of Alibaba Cloud Global, said in 2016 that the combination would benefit customers in Hong Kong and across Asia.
For enterprises, the appeal was buying DDoS protection from a network carrier they might already use. The protection was delivered from the cloud, so customers did not have to install their own mitigation equipment.
Scope of the announcement
The announcement was a commercial agreement on distribution. It did not state pricing, service-level terms or a launch schedule for specific markets. The main details given in 2016 were the product category, the layer 7 coverage, the real-time visibility and the roles of the two companies.