According to Gartner, downtime costs enterprises around $5,600 per minute. For any business, it is a significant loss since the median downtime of a DDoS attack lasts between seven to twelve hours.

SMBs spend an average of $120k for remediation during a DDoS attack – according to Kaspersky labs.

Bandwidth, a leading communication service provider, lost $700,000 in their 3^rd quarter of 2021 revenue due to a DDoS attack. There is a high cost to pay for DDoS attacks. With costs rapidly increasing, what is the best DDoS mitigation service?

In this article, we throw light on the different types of DDoS mitigation services and how you should choose one.

Types of DDoS Mitigation Services

DDoS attacks are so common these days owing to the availability of technology, DDoS services for hire, and the general ease of orchestrating these attacks. Organizations cannot afford to be complacent about DDoS prevention. Choosing the right type of anti-DDoS solution from among the various DDoS mitigation services is critical.

Categorization Based on Mode of Deployment

On-premise Services

On-premise DDoS mitigation services offer inline solutions installed at the company’s data centers. They are well-equipped to detect and mitigate DDoS attacks at the network, application, and SSL layers. The main advantage of this type of DDoS mitigation service is that it can detect and neutralize attacks quickly.

However, these inline solutions are incapable of handling large volumetric attacks that flood the server and deplete computational resources. They are also ineffective at protecting web applications and services hosted on the cloud infrastructure. Further, not every organization would have the in-house expertise to install and manage DDoS protection devices, hardware, and software.

Cloud-based Services

Cloud-based DDoS mitigation services are deployed on the cloud, making them highly elastic, flexible, and scalable. They overcome the challenges of on-premise services as they are well-equipped to absorb volumetric traffic influx with scalable bandwidth and built-in redundancies. They effectively protect all kinds of web apps, devices, systems, networks, and services against various DDoS attacks.

There are three types of cloud-based DDoS services:

• Always-on services: Incoming traffic is routed through local PoP (Points of Presence), detecting and preventing attacks at all layers before reaching the organization’s services and servers.
• On-demand services: When volumetric traffic is detected, it is routed to cloud-based scrubbing centers. Through periodic remote monitoring of internet link utilization, it identifies breaches of specified thresholds. When a breach occurs, traffic is routed to the cloud scrubbing center.
• Hybrid services: Combines the benefits of cloud-based and inline solutions while avoiding the drawbacks.

Here again, it is best to choose cloud-based services that are always-on or hybrid rather than on-demand services. On-demand services are costly as you will be charged for the quantum of traffic protected against. Further, these are ineffective in mitigating and preventing distributed denial of service attacks at the application layer (Layer 7), most of which are encrypted to make them evasive and stealthy.

Categorization Based on Service Provider

Generalist Services

Generalists such as hosting providers, telco providers, ISP (Internet Service Providers), DNS service providers, data center providers, etc., offer distributed denial of service mitigation services and solutions as premium add-ons to their core services. The aim is typical to upsell these security offerings to their existing customers.

While these types of DDoS mitigation services may be effective against small and simpler attacks, they cannot protect against the range of increasingly sophisticated, stealthy, and complicated DDoS attacks of today.

Some of these services may have the capacity to handle volumetric attacks using data scrubbing centers, blackhole/ null routing, sinkholing, etc. However, they do not have the expertise to deal with Layer 7 attacks, multi-vector attacks, and zero-days. Generalist services are also found wanting to protect medium to large-scale multi-tenant networks and servers.

Yes, this type of DDoS mitigation service may seem cheaper as you simply pay a few more dollars with the core service. But by choosing these services, you may save some dollars up front, but you leave your organization at high risk of nasty and severely damaging DDoS attacks.

Specialist Services

Specialty DDoS mitigation services are offered by specialist security companies such as Indusface, with trusted expertise and years of experience building and constantly improving web application security. Specialty DDoS services, as a result, offer advanced anti-DDoS solutions that effectively protect against the stealthiest and most complicated DDoS attacks.

The best specialist services offer the following features:

• Always-on, round-the-clock security against all kinds of DDoS attacks at all layers
• Configurations and customization tailor DDoS protection to suit your unique needs, contexts, and complications faced by your organization, regardless of the scale of operations and complexities.
• Intelligent, fully managed next-gen WAF placed at the network edge monitors incoming traffic granularly and continuously, filtering out malicious requests and bad bots from accessing network resources.
• Globally distributed CDN services, in-built redundancies, and cloud-based architectures can absorb all thunderous herd surges in traffic while accelerating website performance and speed.
• Uses behavioral analysis, heuristic and pattern analysis, fingerprinting, global threat intelligence, crowdsourced threat feeds, etc., to proactively detect and stop anomalous and suspicious activities.
• 24×7 visibility into the security posture with real-time alerts and triggers

Conclusion 

Given the increasing sophistication, doing nothing or hoping that the free or cheap solutions will defend critical infrastructures against DDoS attacks is not the question. For effective protection and risk minimization, choose a specialized, cloud-based type of DDoS mitigation service.

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