Incapsula Takes Aim at CloudFlare With Boosted Network Capacity

Incapsula, the cloud-based website performance and security service, today announced plans to significantly increase its infrastructure capacity throughout this year.

According to a company spokesperson, the investment is a move to take on competitor CloudFlare, which currently operates out of 24 data centers around the world and is used by more than 350,000 websites.

Marc Gaffan, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of Incapsula, told SecurityWeek that the company is not at liberty to publicly disclose the number of sites that use its services, but said they have “tens of thousands” of customers.

Incapsula, which now operates as a subsidiary of Redwood Shores, California-based Imperva, said it will increase its total Points of Presence (POPs) to 30 and increase its global coverage and network capacity to exceed 1.5 Tbps.

During Q1 2014, Incapsula activated new data centers in Seattle, Dallas, and Paris. The company said more would be coming online in Toronto, Mexico City, Madrid, Lima, Seoul, Stockholm, Warsaw and other major cities around the world.

Additionally, each of Incapsula’s POPs will be upgraded to cache 30 times more than its current capacity.

The company also said that it is building several “Mega POPs” in each region to deal with the largest possible attacks.

While an increased number of POPs is always a positive, judging the performance and capacity of a CDN simply on the overall number of POPs is unreasonable. There are many factors to consider such as the available bandwidth, server capacity and configuration of each POP, along with the protocols, technologies and features supported.

Incapsula said its network capacity expanded by 500 percent in 2013, and that it would almost double its global network from 16 to 30 high-powered data centers during the rest of 2014.

“Website and cloud application performance are as critical as they have ever been, and security challenges show no signs of abating,” said Gur Shatz, co-founder and CEO at Incapsula.

According to a recent report from Neustar, the number of DDoS attacks jumped significantly in 2013, and dealing with them was not cheap. In a survey of 450 companies in North America across various verticals, 60 percent reported experiencing a DDoS attack in 2013, up from just 35 percent in 2012. Overall, these attacks  did not last as long: 77 percent reported the attacks lasted less than a day, compared to 63 percent in 2012. Less than two percent reported the attacks lasting a week, compared to 13 percent in 2012.

According to DDoS protection firm Black Lotus, new distributed reflected denial-of-service (DrDoS) threats could lead to attacks in excess of 800 Gbps during the next 12 to 18 months.

Additionally, a recent report from Imperva highlighted increased activity of hacker-owned bots, used for corporate espionage, website hijacking and data theft.

A recent report from Distil Networks found that bad bot traffic nearly doubled as a percentage of all Web traffic during 2013, from 12.25 percent to 23.6 percent. The biggest offender was the notorious Pushdo botnet, which is believed to have infected 4.2 million IPs.

Incapsula has found that in 2013, malicious bots accounted for over 31 percent of all Internet traffic.