Service

Critical services protection

Need to protect business-critical services from targeted DDoS attacks? Our critical services protection service is fast, focused, and responds 24/7 – giving you extra peace of mind.

Contact your account manager

About critical services protection

As part of your Janet Network connection, we offer a foundation level of DDoS mitigation to everyone. This service provides basic mitigation against DDoS attacks on your Janet connection.

But do you have additional requirements from your DDoS mitigation, such as the need to protect specific, business critical services? Do you need to show you’re doing as much as you can to maintain business continuity at critical times, such as clearing, the start of the academic year or during peak operating months?

If so, we suggest our critical services protection service – which offers out-of-hours coverage, customisable protection of your externally-facing services and fast DDoS mitigation response times including the option of permanent mitigation.

By choosing critical services protection, you can show you’re doing what you can to maintain access to business-critical services – helping you to maintain your organisation’s reputation and protect the bottom line.

Services we can protect

Web
Email
Telephony/SIP
DNS
VPN
ADFS
Bespoke options such as firewalls

Protection when you need it - for FE and HE

In addition to offering year-round protection of your critical business services (including your website, email, telephony/SIP, DNS, VPN or ADFS) we also offer four-month protection packages. With banded pricing per protected service starting from as little as £275 for FE and £900 for HE, this allows you to protect your services when it matters most, such as during clearing and enrolment, or at any other time you choose.

If you have already subscribed to year-round critical services protection, the four-month package also allows you to enhance the level of protection you have in place. For example, you may wish to add VPN protection to allow staff and students to work uninterrupted away from campus, securely accessing critical business systems whilst working remotely.

How does critical services protection help my organisation?

Critical services protection offers a range of options to help you mitigate DDoS attacks targeted at your services more quickly and in a more customisable way, compared to our foundation service which protects your Janet connection.

Faster DDoS mitigation

By reacting quickly to a DDoS attack, critical services protection reduces the window of time in which an attack can disrupt your services.
You can select one of two reaction levels:

Fast - this reaction level offers mitigation within four minutes
Instant - with ‘always-on’ instant reaction, your traffic is routed permanently via the mitigation service, so there’s no delay in defence.

These automated services react 24/7, helping you prevent disruption from out-of-hours attacks.

Customisable options to suit your needs

Critical services protection is customisable – letting you detect attacks more accurately and mitigate them more effectively. You can select either pre-configured or bespoke mitigation:

Pre-configured - choose from a selection of profiles designed to protect a selection of common services, such as web servers or DNS – using alert triggers and mitigation responses designed by Jisc security analysts to be suitable for most needs
Bespoke - customise your protection further, adjusting parameters with the help of a security analyst. For example:
- Add protection for external-facing services not normally included in pre-configured profiles (such as internet-facing file transfer or a service unique to your institution)
- Customise protection to include or exclude specific domains or URLs

If you select a bespoke option, this gives you access to in-depth reporting via our cyber security portal.

Part of a suite of security services

Critical services protection is part of our suite of security services. These are designed to defend the Janet Network, to protect your organisation, and to help you to protect your organisation yourself.

Cyber security portal

Gain insight to your network security delivered via Janet, including DDoS mitigation data, via our cyber security portal. Your dashboard provides information about your network traffic in relation to DDoS attacks, alerts and in-progress or past mitigations.

Case studies

Kingston University

Clearing at Kingston University is as busy as the Black Friday sales and they needed to reduce the risks and make resilient systems even stronger. Find out how they have adopted a variety of technologies to deal with evolving security threats and why they chose critical services protection (pdf).

New College Durham

New College Durham has been ahead of the curve with their proactive approach to combating the threat of DDoS attacks. Find out how they are keeping their staff, learners and institution safe with DDoS protection (pdf).

Find out more

To find out more and to arrange a scoping call, contact securityservices@jisc.ac.uk or speak to your account manager.

How to buy

Eligible Jisc members can purchase critical services protection direct from Jisc, however Jisc have been appointed as an approved supplier on the Crown Commercial Services dynamic purchasing system (DPS).

The benefit for our members in purchasing through the DPS is that it allows public sector buyers to procure an extensive variety of cyber security services from a range of pre-qualified suppliers.

Visit the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) website for more information. The ‘how to buy’ section gives full details for registering as a buyer and navigating through the process.

Once registered, to find critical services protection in the list of suppliers, enter the search terms “threat intelligence” or “cyber incident response".

The CCS run regular webinars for customers explaining what and how to buy from the new cyber security DPS. See upcoming webinar sessions.

ISO certification

This service is included within the scope of our ISO9001 and ISO27001 certificates.