Microsoft have announced that a new SKU for its cloud computing platform Azure's DDoS Protection offering, which it says is specifically designed with SMBs in mind, is now available in public preview.
Dubbed "IP Protection" the latest SKU is built to defend against L3/L4 DDoS attacks via "always-on monitoring and adaptive tuning".
According to Microsoft, IP Protection integrates with other Azure services such as Azure Firewall Manager, Microsoft Sentinel, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud to provide real-time alerts and metrics to enable protection for a single public IP.
Azure's new DDoS SKU
Prices will vary by region, but IP Protection will work out significantly cheaper than Microsoft's enterprise-focused "Network Protection" tier if you have less than 15 public IP resources to protect.
For users in the Central US region, IP Protection is set to cost around $199/£172 per month per public IP resource protected.
By contrast, enterprises will need to pay a staggering $2,944/£2,542 a month for each DDoS protection plan they sign up for, a potential roadblock to cutting cloud costs.
IP Protection is currently available for preview in select regions of America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia Pacific including west and central India.
You can check the new solution out by heading to the Azure Preview Portal, while Microsoft claims a release to the mainline Azure Portal won't be too far behind.
The news comes as DDoS attacks, where would-be hackers look to flood the targeted machine's website with countless superfluous requests to try and overload it, making it inaccessible for users, remain enormously common.
TechRadar Pro previously reported in October that, according to research from StormWall, there has been a 90% increase in DDoS attacks since Q3 2021.
Out of all the sectors looked at telecommunications was by far the hardest hit, accounting for almost 43.2% of all incidents, a sevenfold year-on-year increase.
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