Forced degradation is the process of slowly degrading a system’s performance until it no longer functions. This can test the validity of a system or even as an attack tool against competitors. It has many implications for business owners and should not be taken lightly. This blog post will discuss some main points:
How Does It Affect Businesses?
It attacks can cause two types of problems for a system’s performance:
- It will lower the quality and quantity of service by increasing latency, packet loss, or jitter. A variety of other symptoms may be observed, such as slow page loads, slowness to respond to requests, etc. This is because it will amplify the effects of congestion elsewhere in a network
- It may cause nodes to be disconnected or overload other parts of the system. This can result in service outages and downtime for your business if not addressed quickly.
Solutions:
The best solution is preventative – make sure you have proper safeguards in place to avoid this.
If you are experiencing it, we would recommend the following steps:
- Investigate and identify the source; this may be a specific link or node in your network with more traffic than it can handle. The identification process is determined by analyzing packet loss, latency, and jitter.
- Resolve it by increasing capacity to this link, adding bandwidth, or changing routing protocols (bandwidth is the best solution).
- Test and validate network performance post changes before introducing them into production use.
- Continue monitoring for future occurrences. This will help identify any new patterns.