Author: Danielle

Just in time for Windows 7 to die, Microsoft is porting DirectX 12 to it — on a game-by-game basis. The first game to deliver will be World of Warcraft, with others to follow.

Microsoft’s latest graphics API has actually been around since 2015. But Microsoft typically reserved its latest features for Windows 10, the latest OS that already demands the latest hardware. DirectX 12’s support for multithreading, for example, already generates “substantial framerate impriovement,” Microsoft says.

Enter Activision Blizzard, which added DirectX12 support for its venerable World of Warcraft MMORPG in 2018. With an estimated 5 million gamers still playing it this year, Blizzard asked DirectX 12 to be ported to Windows 7, which presumably many of its players were still running. Microsoft agreed, and ported the D3D12 runtime to Windows 7. It’s now available as a patch to the game. 

That doesn’t mean DX12 will be released for Windows 7 on a wholesale basis, though. Microsoft said it will patch existing games with Windows 7 support, and that it’s working with a few other game developers to port their DirectX 12 games to Windows 7.

Microsoft is still encouraging you to buy Windows 10 if you haven’t already, though. “The best DirectX 12 performance will always be on Windows 10, since Windows 10 contains a number of OS optimizations designed to make DirectX 12 run even faster,” the company says.

What this means to you: The timing of this is a little peculiar, since one part of Microsoft is desperate to migrate the Windows 7 user base to Windows 10. But there’s still nine months or so before the final deadline crashes down this coming January, and Microsoft can build some goodwill until then.

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The Yoga series is doing its best to change your perception of Lenovo devices, moving away from the bulky ThinkPads towards something much more sleek and stylish. The Yoga S730 is a product of this philosophy borrowing fairly (extremely) heavily from Dell’s XPS playbook to position itself against the market leader and other notable competitors such as the HP Envy.

The Yoga series was first introduced to us back in 2012 but has become steadily more complicated since then, with the ‘S’ model name being its flagship laptop range, ‘D’ being reserved for its 2-in-1s and ‘C’ referring to its convertibles.

We first saw the S730 back at CES 2019 as one of several Lenovo devices on offer, we were certainly impressed and we’ve managed to the S730 into our lab for a closer look – so without further delay, lets drive in.

Price & Availability

The Lenovo Yoga S730 is available right now directly from  and Amazon. In the US and Canada, the device is named the IdeaPad 730S and you can get it directly from

The Yoga ships in a couple of different versions, starting at / and going all the way up to / depending on your choice of specs.

The standard version comes with an Intel Core i5, 8GB memory and a 256GB SSD while the most expensive will arrive with an Intel Core i7, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD.

You’ll only be getting a 1920×1080 Full HD display no matter which version you get, so do keep that in mind.

Lenovo appears to be pricing the Yoga S730 as a plucky XPS 13 alternative with the standard undercutting tactic of roughly 90 percent of the features and performance at 70 percent of the price. It’s going to have to do some work to come close to the Dell’s 2019 XPS 13 though, which we very much approved of in our review.

Make sure you stay up to date with our take on

Design & Build

The Yoga S730 is available in a platinum or iron grey aesthetic – aiming for the sleek, stylish and minimalistic look so common among laptops these days and pulling it off very nicely indeed.

The device is incredibly thin at 11.9mm, so much so it almost looks flimsy and could feel frail in the hand but the case and exterior feel surprisingly sturdy thanks to the aluminium construction – after handling it and using it for a few days, I got used to something so small and thin being remarkably sturdy and well made.

The dimensions are as follows:

• Height: 11.9mm (0.5in)
• Width: 307mm (12.1in)
• Depth: 210mm (8.3in)
• Weight: From 1.1kg (2.4 pounds)

The drop-down hinge that attaches the display to the device has been designed by Lenovo in-house and feels very impressive. The laptop can be opened with one hand and we found very little screen wobble when doing this, which is great to see. It can also open to almost a 180-degree angle which is pretty rare, and allows the laptop to be used in a wide variety of positions which is always useful.

The device has obviously been made with portability in mind and feels like a premium product without a doubt, both looking and feeling the part while being easy to move around in the hands or in a laptop bag on the go.

Keyboard & Trackpad

The keyboard is nicely arranged on the body and surprisingly well sized, making it feel somewhat less cramped and restrictive than what you may expect from a laptop of this size.

The keys are two-stage backlit, are rounded and have a soft finish with a respectable amount of travel making it very pleasant to type on. Some keyboards in this particular class of laptops feel thin and harsh to type on, but this one is pleasant to use all around.

This is the first Yoga to not have a touchscreen and active pen support which means that the trackpad is the only device that allows interaction with the mouse – luckily it does a great job at this. The touchpad itself is made from glass and at 105 x 70mm is, like the keyboard, a great size for a device of this scale.

The trackpad is both accurate and receptive of all gestures and generally a pleasure to use – we didn’t encounter any of the issues that would usually come with cheaper built devices. The usual test of trackpads is if you don’t have much to say, it’s doing its job correctly – it’s a thankless role but an oh-so-important one.

Display

The display for the Yoga S730 is a 13.3in Full HD IPS screen and sadly this is the only option for this device – so you won’t be able to get a 4K screen which confirms the laptop as a mid-range device.

The display holds a pixel density of 165ppi which is fairly standard for a device in this price range and the screen also reaches a reasonable if not amazing level of brightness at 290 cd/m2 – however the glossy finish that is present on this display does make it difficult to view when outside due to the amount of light it reflects, so do keep that in mind.

Specs and Performance

The S730 comes with either an Intel Core i5-8265U or an Intel Core i7-8565U, between 8GB and 16GB of DDR3L-2133 memory and a 256GB, 512GB, 1TB or 2TB SSD. However, the UK tops out at 512GB.

You’re going to be seeing roughly the same spec sheet for most laptops around this price point. These specs will handle the vast majority of everyday tasks with ease, and only some really strenuous number crunching tasks will cause this device any real problems.

Our review model came with the i7-8565U and 8GB of RAM and came back with the following results:

The results are roughly in-line with what we would expect, but one important thing to note is that this laptop does appear to suffer from some minor overheating issues. It’s nothing dangerous, but the fan is pretty fast to spool up and this will mean the processor’s performance is almost certainly being temperature throttled.

This isn’t the end of the world if you’re doing basic tasks, but if you’re looking to squeeze every last drop of performance out of this thing it is something to keep in mind – this sort of drawback is fairly common territory at with any of Intel’s latest generation processors at this price point.

On the graphics side, the S730 comes with an integrated Intel UHD Graphics 620 GPU which puts out a respectable amount of performance when coupled with the dual-channel RAM. However, this is not a gaming laptop and will be far outstripped by laptops with a dedicated GPU – such as the NVIDIA GeForce MX150 that you’ll find on Lenovo’s IdeaPad 720.

Battery Life

Lenovo promises 12 hours of life from the battery on the S730. We put this to the test by setting the screen brightness to 120cd/m2 (around 40 percent screen brightness) and running a 720p video on a loop until the laptop runs out of power.

This test resulted in the battery lasting nine hours and eight minutes which is fairly respectable but does come in below a lot of the competition in the super-portable laptop market. The 2019 XPS, for example, lasts over 11 hours without breaking a sweat.

The form-factor of these ultra-thin laptops is certainly having an effect on how long they can last, but it should still be enough to see you through a workday.

We also tested the fast charge feature which Lenovo said will charge the battery to 80 percent in an hour. Our own tests saw the battery charge to 77 percent in an hour, so we’re happy to confirm Lenovo’s claims on this one.

Connectivity

The largest point to keep in mind when looking at connectivity is the lack of any USB-A ports on the S730. The frame isn’t actually thick enough to house one properly – which is great news for the portability and handling of the device, but less welcome news for those of us who haven’t quite made the jump to USB-C yet.

You’ll find three USB-C ports on the laptop, two on the right side and one next to the headphone jack on the left side. The two right ports support DisplayPort and Thunderbolt 3 – while the single port on the left supports USB-PD (Power Delivery) which allows the device to be charged through a USB-C port.

You might not expect it at this price, but the S730 has a fingerprint scanner so you can log into Windows with ease.

Verdict

The Yoga S730 is a solid device but we struggled to think of it as anything but a budget XPS 13. That’s not necessarily a bad thing either but the device does little to create its own identity and it certainly feels like it’s been designed with a ‘how do we make an XPS but cheaper’ goal in mind.

It’s super light and respectively sturdy with a good quality display, a generous amount of USB-C ports and an impressive array of specs that will handle almost any daily task you can throw at it.

However, the battery life isn’t all that impressive and with no dedicated or external GPU option, USB-A ports or 4K screen option – the device lacks versatility and doesn’t step out of its box of a small, lightweight executive word-processing companion.

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March Madness is now less than a week away, and that means you can find big discounts on top-selling TVs from online retailers. Amazon is currently running a sale on 4K TV deals for the big tournament. For a limited time, you can save up to $500 on big-screen 4K TVs from top brands such as Sony and LG.

You can get the Sony 55-inch 4K TV on sale for $598. That’s the best price we’ve seen for this top-rated 4K TV with smart capabilities. Watching the game on the Sony KD55X750F will make you feel like your there in-person with an ultra HD picture that features 4K X-Reality PRO that delivers stunning accuracy and brilliant colors and contrasts. The Sony KD55X750F works with Amazon Alexa and the Google Assistant so you can use your voice to control your TV. The Android TV also has the Google Assistant built-in so you can use your TV as a hub to control your compatible smart home devices and use the remote to ask Google questions.

Shop the rest of Amazon’s 4K TV deals below and make sure to take advantage of these limited-time discounts while you can.

Shop more of best cheap TV deals and sale prices that are currently going on and read our buying guide on the Best TVs in 2019 and which big screen TVs are really worth buying.

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The Galaxy S10 and Galaxy Fold might be grabbing all the headlines but Samsung also announced new headphones at its Unpacked event. We’ve got a pair so here are our thoughts on the Galaxy Buds.

Price

The first piece of good news is that you can pick up the Galaxy Buds for a more affordable price compared to the £199 from last year.

The Galaxy Buds are £139/$129 which means they are cheaper than Apple’s AirPods, and most other wireless earbuds. This is one of the plus points for the Buds already.

You can order them from Samsung, Carphone Warehouse and Amazon.

Design & Build

The Galaxy Buds come in three colours: a garish neon yellow (which might go with your gym kit), black and white. We’ve taken a look at the latter, which has a sort of mother of pearl effect on the outer part of the earbud.

Regardless of what colour you choose, the Galaxy Buds are smaller and lighter than the IconX. They’re 30 percent smaller, in fact and just 5.6g per bud so are more comfortable. 

You get three different sizes of tips in the box and three different wingtips, too, so you should be able to find the right combination for your ears. We found them comfortable and didn’t find them slipping out much at all.

Samsung does show them being used for running so an IPX2 rating means the odd drip of sweat or water isn’t something to worry about.

On the outside of each ear bud is a touch sensitive panel so you can easily control your playback including play/pause and skipping tracks. They can also be used to handle calls and summon Bixby (or other digital assistants).

Both sides do the same thing so it doesn’t matter which one you reach for. The only real issue here is that should you need to adjust the earphone, you’ll probably end up tapping the button by mistake.

The last thing to mention here is the charging case, which is like most others. The Buds sit neatly inside when you’re not using them and charge via tiny metal contacts. The case is smaller than before and stays shut with magnets.

An LED on the front tells you when charging it taking place but there’s no way of knowing how much juice the case has left which is a shame. A set of four or five LEDs and a button would do the trick.

The case itself charges via USB-C or wireless charging. If you get a Galaxy S10 you can make use of its Wireless PowerShare feature to charge the case by placing it on the back of the phone. That’s pretty cool.

Features & Sound Quality

Headphones these days are much more than just ‘how do they sound’, modern features and smart elements are almost essential to attract consumers. While the Galaxy Buds have a few interesting things going on, it depends what phone you have as to whether you can take advantage of them.

AirPods Alternative?

Like Apple’s AirPods, Samsung has made sure the Galaxy Buds are easy to pair with a Galaxy device. When you open the case your Samsung should see them and pop up a message. Agree to the settings and you’re all set.

If you’re looking for AirPods alternatives then the Galaxy Buds aren’t really the best choice. There’s nothing stopping you using them with an iPhone but the experience is very different namely because Samsung has a Galaxy Wearable app on Android that you’ll need to make the most out of the Buds – otherwise it’s like having a supercar with a speed restriction.

With the app, you can control lots of features the Galaxy Buds have; some of which you’d otherwise not even know about. There’s an equaliser so you can adjust the sound profile and you can also do other things like cusomise the touch buttons (the long press anyway).

One of those features you might not even know about it Ambient Sound which lets you hear what’s going on around you using the microphones on the outside. You can switch this on permanently for things like running so you’re safer or just use it temporarily with a long press for things like announcements or if someone asks you something.

The Wearable app also lets you choose what notifications are allowed through and can also be used to find lost Buds. 

With sensors on the inside of each bud, your music pauses when you take the headphones like many modern pairs of headphones.

Solid Sound

Like other Samsung products, these are ‘sound by AKG’ (not ‘tuned’ any longer) and the Galaxy Buds sound good. However, they don’t blow us away like some rivals.

This is partly down to the Buds lacking the aptX codec the IconX headphones have. We assume this is part of cost saving but does mean a downgrade on wireless sound quality.

Thanks to a good fit, the earphones offer excellent noise isolation. You can’t hear the outside world much at all which is good but the Ambient Sound mode is handy to the aforementioned situations. The fit also helps with sound quality, especially bass.

We find the Galaxy Buds to have a pretty flat response so there’s no big emphasis on a particular area like bass or mid-range. This makes them good for lots of different types of music but also means they don’t have much of a wow factor.

There are five modes in the equalizer – Bass boost, Soft, Dynamic, Clear, Treble boost – so you can try these out to see if any suit your personal taste or the type of content you’re listening to. We’re not overly keen on any of them apart from Dynamic but even this option has a slightly artificial sound to it. 

At this price, the Galaxy Buds sound good but if you’re after the best quality then we’d recommend spending a little more on the RHA True Connect.

Longevity

In terms of battery life you’ll get up to six hours of music playback or five hours of calls. In our testing we got pretty close to that six hour mark for rocking out to some banging tunes.

The slight disappointment here is that the charging case can only increase things to 13 hours (or 11 for talk time) when we’re used to wireless earbuds being charged multiple times from the case. 

The total time isn’t bad but there are longer lasting rivals out there if that’s what you need. The advantage here is that case charges quickly over USB-C and also wireless charging. As we mentioned earlier, you can use the Galaxy S10’s reverse wireless charging to top up the case – handy if you don’t mind your phone being face down for a bit. 

Verdict

The Galaxy Buds seem are a decent pair of wireless earbuds offering a good combination of price, design, features and sound quality.

We find them comfortable which is tricky to achieve with wireless earbuds and some of the features here are useful like responsive touch controls and an Ambient Sound mode. With no aptX, the Buds aren’t the best sounding earbuds around and don’t have the best battery life either.

It’s also worth noting that iPhone users won’t be able to make the most of the Galaxy Buds with the essential companion app only available on Android. Even in the Android world, the Buds are best used with the Galaxy S10 to make use of the smart pairing and reverse wireless charging.

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Think of the cloud as a serviced apartment: your business’s fully-managed home on the internet. While the cloud provider is responsible for everything from the underlying architecture to physical security, accessibility and maintenance, the tenant is responsible for their own possessions – in this case, the applications and the data within them.

Similar to our homes, our clouds can quickly become cluttered and complex as we add more items over the years, making everyday management increasingly unwieldy and expensive. Like the cupboard under the stairs full of defunct devices and outdated documents, the cloud can become a graveyard for once-useful resources that are no longer adding value. But to extend the metaphor, you can’t make better use of your space if you don’t know what you have, and which items should be thrown away. In the same way, you can’t optimise your cloud if you don’t understand its components and which parts of the business they serve.

Every cloud needs constant attention to maximise usability and performance. This is why it’s so important that items are clearly labelled so we know what resources are kept where, and why they’re there. In other words, you have to understand your cloud landscape before you can optimise it. That’s where tagging comes in.

Tagging provides visibility over your cloud spend and usage and represents the all-important first step in taking full control over your enterprise’s cloud. 

Making sense of your cloud

You can think of tags as labels, or metadata, that you assign to the resources in your cloud environment to help you identify them from different perspectives, such as who owns an asset or when it was created.  This enables you to sort, report and analyse these assets in whatever way you wish.  However, some thought is required up-front to ensure your tagging strategy meets your specific requirements.

So, how can you get started on a tagging strategy that will ensure all your resources are fully labelled and identifiable? The first step is to conduct a thorough appraisal of your business needs to ensure that you fully understand what information about your IT estate the organisation requires to function efficiently. What insights would benefit the business, making it easier to align your cloud to use cases?

This can’t be a top-down process: you need to involve every stakeholder across the business – from finance to operations, engineering to human resources – to ensure that your tagging strategy meets all your requirements. The last thing you want is a business department to lose sight of critical resources they need to get the job done, so it’s important that everyone is involved.

Remember, you don’t have to tackle tagging all at once. Start with around three or five classifications for your cloud assets. These should support specific aims such as improving the visibility of your resources, clarifying ownership, or identifying the costs associated with that asset: for example, you could tag by business unit, product or service, owner and role.

There’s plenty of time to expand these tag classifications later, but it’s important first to establish a naming convention to avoid confusion or double-tagging. We recommend that you split your tags into four discrete categories – Technical, Business, Automation & Security – and then prefix your tags to clearly identify which category they relate to: for example, ‘tech:Version’ or ‘bus:Customer’. Whatever categories you choose, make sure they are used consistently.

If you have only a small number of resources, then you could manage tagging through a spreadsheet, although this will quickly become impossible to manage as your business and its cloud assets grow. This is where a good cloud service management platform can make all the difference, by not only helping you label and keep track of your assets, but also providing you with detailed analytics and reports – along with real-time recommendations on how to optimise your use of cloud resources.

The benefits of cloud optimisation

Tagging is just one way of helping your business improve its cloud infrastructure, however. To ensure you’re getting the most out of your cloud, and that it continues to be a value-add rather than a cost-centre across its lifetime, you should look to implement an ongoing cloud optimisation programme. Too many companies fall into the habit of treating cloud as a static installation. In actual fact, it should be an iterative, constantly-evolving asset, growing and changing as your business does.

The process of optimisation tunes your environment to suit the specific capacity, cost and availability requirements of your individual workload. It should be a continuous cycle that starts with measurement and monitoring aided by tagging, before rightsizing to ensure that the provisioned capacity meets your needs (and doesn’t over-fulfil them). Where possible you should give some consideration to your application architecture, autoscaling to meet demand as it occurs is a much more efficient use of cloud technology – and finally pricing to ensure you’re paying the right price for the resources you need, upfront reservations should be a consideration at this stage. Finally, it should look at storage to ensure you match your needs to the cloud vendor’s capabilities – there are often more cost effective ways to store infrequently accessed data.

To ensure your system is up to date, formal optimisation reviews should occur in roughly six-monthly cycles to ensure the workload is re-tuned in line with technical advancements and upgrades to your cloud architecture. Optimisation reviews should also evaluate updated regulatory and compliance requirements against enhanced cloud features and upgrades.

A cloud optimisation programme can also help you ensure that the performance of your workloads is optimised, including their scalability, accessibility and resilience, whilst reducing costs, and can help you to take advantage of the newest capabilities offered by cloud providers like AWS, Google and Azure.

The bottom line is that an effective cloud optimisation programme should be a complimentary combination of different processes, from workload management to tag management. A thorough approach is the best way to eliminate inefficiencies in your infrastructure and ensure that your cloud’s growth is a benefit, not a hindrance. To take the ‘serviced apartment’ metaphor outside, it’s like gardening – yes, you look for the best ways to make sure your plants grow and thrive, but you also need to prune them back regularly to stop them from taking over your garden.

There’s never a bad time to get your house (or your garden) in order, and the same goes for your cloud. The more you understand about your company’s cloud, the more value you can bring through optimisation. Realising the benefits of cloud computing isn’t a given; it’s the product of thoughtful management. Get tagging today to stop sprawl, save money, and ensure you’re getting the most business value out of your cloud.

Jeremy Chaplin, Cloud Optimisation Consultant at KCOM

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In October 2016 DNS provider Dyn was hit by a major DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack by an army of IoT devices which had been hacked specially for the purpose. Over 14,000 domains using Dyn’s services were overwhlemed and became unreachable including big names like Amazon, HBO, and PayPal. 

According to research by Cloudflare the average cost of infrastructure failure to businesses is $100,000 (£75,000) per hour. How then can you make sure that your organization doesn’t fall victim to this kind of attack. In this guide you’ll discover major infrastructure providers who have the necessary digital muscle to protect against attacks designed to flood your network capacity. 

You’ll also discover which providers can offer protection against more sophisticated application (layer 7) attacks, which can be carried out without a huge number of hacked computers (sometimes known as a botnet). 

1. Project Shield

Project Shield is the creation of Jigsaw, an offshoot Google’s parent company Alphabet. Development began several years ago under George Conard in the wake of attacks on election monitoring and human rights related websites in the Ukraine.

Project Shield is able to filter potential malicious traffic by acting as a reverse proxy which sits between a website and the internet at large, filtering connection requests. If a connection seems to be from a legitimate visitor Project Shield permits the connection request. If a connection request is determined to be bad e.g. multiple connection attempts from the same IP address, then it is blocked. This system makes Project Shield extremely easy to implement simply by changing your servers DNS settings. 

Any power users reading may wonder how filtering traffic via a proxy will work with SSL. Fortunately, Jigsaw has thought of this and has put together a comprehensive tutorial to make sure secure connections to your site work seamlessly. Several other tutorials are also available in the support section.

Currently Project Shield is only available for media, election monitoring and human rights related websites. The primary focus is also on small under resourced websites which cannot afford expensive hosting solutions to protect themselves for DDoS. If your organization doesn’t match these requirements you may have to consider an alternative solution such as Cloudflare. 

2. Cloudflare

Anyone who has used the Internet in the last few years will be familiar with Cloudflare as many major websites make use of its protection. Although Cloudflare is based in the US it maintains a 165 data centers around the world: an infrastructure to rival Google’s. This maximizes your sites chances of staying online.

Every Cloudflare user can choose to activate the ‘I’m under attack’ mode which can protect against even the most sophisticated of DoS attacks by presenting a Javascript challenge. As a matter of routine Cloudflare also acts as a reverse proxy sitting between visitors and your site host to filter traffic in much the same way as Jigsaw’s Project Shield.  

Visitors making connection requests have to run a gauntlet of sophisticated filters including site reputation, whether their IP has been Blacklisted and if the HTTP header seems suspicious. HTTP requests are finger printed to protect against known Botnets. As an industry giant, Cloudflare can easily leverage its position by sharing intel across the 7+ million websites it manages.  

Cloudflare offers a free basic package which includes unmetered DDoS mitigation. For those who are willing to pay for a Cloudflare business subscription (prices start at $200 or £149 a month), more advanced protection is available such as custom SSL certificate uploads. 

3. AWS Shield

AWS Shield protection is provided by the good people of Amazon web services. The ‘Standard’ tier is available to all AWS customers at no extra charge. This is ideal as many small businesses choose to host their websites with Amazon. AWS Shield Standard is available to all customers at no extra charge. It protects against more typical network (layer 3) and transport (layer 4) attacks when used Amazon’s Cloud Front and Route 53 services.    

This should put off all but the most determined hackers. However, your bandwidth e.g. 15Gbp/s will still be limited by the size of you Amazon instance making it feasible for hackers to carry out a DoS attack if they have sufficient resources. Worse still you remain responsible for paying for the extra traffic to your instance.

To mitigate this Amazon also offers AWS Shield Advanced. A Subscription include DDoS cost protection, which can save you from a huge spike in your monthly usage bill if you are the victim of an attack. AWS Shield Advanced can also deploy your ACL’s (Access Control Lists) to the border of the AWS network itself giving you protection against even the largest of attacks.  

Advanced Subscribers also benefit from a round the clock DRT (DDoS response team) as well as detailed metrics on any attacks on your instances. The piece of mind afforded by AWS Shield Advanced is expensive however. You must be willing to subscribe for a minimum of one year for a price of $3,000 (£2,200)  a month. This is in addition to data transfer usage costs which you can cover on a ‘pay as you go’ basis. 

4. Microsoft Azure

Like Amazon, Microsoft offers the option to rent service space via their service Azure. All members benefit from basic DDoS protection. Features include always on traffic monitoring and real time mitigation of network (layer 3) attacks for any public IP addresses you use. This is the very same type of protection afforded to Microsoft’s own online services and the entire resources of Azure’s network can be used to absorb DDoS attacks.  

For organisations in need of more sophisticated protection Azure also offers a ‘Standard’ tier. This has been widely praised for being very easy to enable, requiring just a few clicks of your mouse. Crucially Azure does not require you to make any changes to your apps although the standard tier does offer protection against application (layer 7) DDoS attacks via the app gateway web app firewall. Azure monitor can show you real time metrics if an attack does take place. These are retained for 30 days and can be exported for further study if you wish.  

Azure constantly checks web traffic to your resources. If these exceed a pre-defined threshold, DDoS mitigation is automatically launched. This includes inspecting packets to make sure they aren’t malformed or spoofed as well as using rate limiting.  

Standard protection is currently $2,944 (£2,204)  per month plus data charges for up to 100 resources. Protection applies equally to all resources. In other words you cannot tailor DDoS mitigation for individual ones. 

5. Verisign DDoS Protection

Update: Verisign’s security services are transferred to Neustar, but the features and functionality mentioned in the review stayed relatively the same.

Verisign is almost as old as the Internet itself. Since 1995 it has grown from a simple Certificate Authority to a major player in the Network Services industry.  

Verisign DDoS protection operates in the Cloud. Users can choose to redirect connection attempts with a simple change of their DNS (Domain Name Server) settings. Traffic is sent to Verisign for checking to prevent network attacks. Verisign analysis all traffic thoroughly before redirecting.  

As Verisign operates two of the thirteen global route name servers it should come as no surprise that the organization also maintains several dedicated DDoS “scrubbing centers”. These analyze traffic and filter out bad connection requests. The combined infrastructure runs to almost 2TB/s and can block even the most overwhelming DDoS attacks.  

This is largely achieved via Athena, Verisign’s threat mitigation platform. Athena is broadly divided into three elements. The ‘Shield’ filters network (layer 3) and transport (layer 4) attacks via DPI (Deep Packet Inspection), blacklists & whitelists and site reputation management. The Athena ‘proxy’ inspects HTTP headers for bad traffic during initial connection attempts. The ‘proxy’ and ‘shield’ are supported by Athena’s ‘load balancer’ which helps to prevent application (layer 7) attacks.

The customer portal displays detailed reports on traffic and allows you to configure your threat management, for example by creating connection blacklists. For users who are reluctant to deploy everything to the Cloud, Verisign also offers OpenHybrid which can be installed onsite. 

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons (Antoine Lamielle)    

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