Arbor expands Atlas reach

Arbor Networks today unveiled Atlas 2.0, the updated version of its ISP data collection, analysis and sharing product aimed at curtailing security threats to the Internet and ISPs and enabling more informed network capacity planning. The newest Atlas expands its data collection to 100 ISPs, from the original 28, in 17 countries.

The Atlas ISPs participate in the Fingerprint Sharing Alliance, through which they share cyber attack information with each other as well as in Arbor’s yearly Worldwide Security Survey. In addition, they host Darknet sensors to pick up on potential hacker scanning and share, on an anonymous basis, other Internet traffic trends to help create a global view of Internet routing data.

Arbor’s analysts assemble and analyze this data and then share it across the Atlas 2.0 customer base, said Rob Malan, co-founder and chief technology officer of Arbor.

“The conventional wisdom is that ISPs are very competitive and don’t want to share information, don’t want to give anyone a leg up on the market, regardless of the greater good,” Malan said. “That may be true in some aspects of their business, but they do need to share information to really deal with large-scale Internet-wide threats, and they do need a third party to help them arbitrate and mediate the information. We have been fortunate to find ourselves as one of those partners.”

By providing a more comprehensive view of Internet threats through Atlas 2.0, Arbor enables ISPs to compare what is happening on their own networks to what is happening across the broader Internet, both to determine possible anomalies or problems and to assess things like the need to add capacity, said Jim Deleski, director of managed DOS services at Tata Communications, an Atlas customer.

“For us the biggest thing is that this is an augment to our own network intelligence and planning,” Deleski said. “You can never have enough engineers looking at things and collecting enough data. We are using it to vet what we see ourselves. It is good to know if what we are seeing is what everyone else is seeing, and we do see some variances.”

In addition, Deleski said, the information Tata gets from Atlas enables the global service provider to be better prepared for what to expect when it initiates new peering agreements. “We can make educated guesses without that data, but if you are seeing X amount of traffic and after you peer with someone, you see 2.5 times X, then you may have missed the boat and already be behind the curve in capacity planning.”