Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks will continue to rise over the next five years, increasing in size and approaching 1.2 Gb/s, which Cisco says is enough to take most organizations completely offline.

DDoS attacks paralyze networks by flooding servers and network devices with traffic from multiple IP sources.

The networking giant says the number of these incidents grew 172 percent in 2016 and will increase 2.5-fold to 3.1 million globally by 2021.

These numbers are included in Cisco’s annual networking and Internet trends forecast, the Visual Networking Index, now in its 12th year.

The peak DDoS attack size increased 60 percent, year-over-year, and represents up to 18 percent of a country’s total Internet traffic while they are occurring, the report said. Additionally, the average attack size increased to 22 percent, which is relatively the same rate as Internet traffic at 29 percent year over year.

In a blog post, Cisco’s Thomas Barnett, Jr., says the forecast shows a comprehensive security strategy is key to a company’s survival and profitability: “Various levels of protection (hardware and software) are required to prevent network breaches and to protect private records and data.”

The forecast follows a move by Cisco late last month to enter the Internet of Things (IoT) security market with its IoT Threat Defense cyber security architecture. This isn’t a new product, but rather a bunch of Cisco’s existing security services and software bundled together to target IoT security.