Akamai says the new centre extends the overall DDoS attack fighting capability and resiliency of its platform in the Australia New Zealand region.

The Melbourne scrubbing centre will complement Akamai's existing regional DDoS-mitigation-platform footprint, and Akamai now has 19 scrubbing centres around the world, including a regional footprint in Melbourne, Sydney, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Osaka and Singapore.

Akamai’s scrubbing centres are centralised data-cleansing stations, that filter out malicious traffic before it can reach the applications and data centres of Akamai’s customers, and by blocking attack traffic at the edge, Akamai says it helps to make sure that ‘good’ traffic can still be processed efficiently, without the end-customers’ infrastructures becoming overwhelmed.

According to Akamai researchers, over the course of 2018, they noticed a 97.7% growth rate in attack size, with a median in January of .56 Gbps ballooning to 1.548 Gbps by December.

Akamai says that as attackers up the ante with bigger botnets, it is responding with greater capacity to absorb attack traffic.

Akamai Vice President and Managing Director for Asia Pacific & Japan, Graeme Beardsell, said: “The launch of our second scrubbing centre in Australia reinforces our DDoS mitigation capabilities in the region and demonstrates our commitment to continuously improving the cyber security posture of businesses and government departments.”

Beardsell says Akamai’s scrubbing centres are a key element of its Prolexic Routed solutions, which is designed to stop DDoS attacks in the cloud, before they reach applications, data centres, and infrastructure. It’s built on a DDoS mitigation platform with 19 global scrubbing centres that are closer to users and attackers, which minimises performance latency and improves network resiliency.