Benefits of Hybrid DDoS Protection

The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) threat landscape is continuously evolving, with threat actors employing new attack vectors, approaches, and dynamically changing attacks to evade defenses. DDoS attacks are getting larger and more sophisticated and are occurring more often than ever. To combat these elusive attacks, organizations need to employ a hybrid approach to DDoS defenses.

What Is Hybrid DDoS Protection?

Hybrid DDoS protection combines multiple approaches to combatting DDoS attacks, specifically a combination of on-premises and cloud-based defenses. This approach creates a layered, resilient security posture that can mitigate many types of DDoS attacks. With the right suite of DDoS protection solutions fed with high-quality threat intelligence, many attacks can be automatically blocked with minimal human interaction.

On-Premises DDoS Defenses

Leveraging an on-premises DDoS protection solution has several advantages. The most effective on-premises solutions are stateless, allowing them to resist state exhaustion DDoS attacks that can render stateful devices, such as firewalls, unavailable. These solutions are also ideal for blocking application layer attacks that can affect the availability of key applications. Application availability issues can lead to frustrated customers, reduced employee productivity, and more, resulting in negative impacts to the bottom line and reputation.

On-premises DDoS protection also provides a lower-latency defense due to its position on the network. By being located on the premises, it can react more quickly to provide faster defenses against many attacks.

Cloud-Based DDoS Defenses

Implementing cloud-based DDoS protections provides coverage against large-scale volumetric DDoS attacks. This type of protection is more scalable to handle the largest attacks, but often introduces latency due to the need to route traffic to scrubbing centers for processing. In some cases, these scrubbing centers are located across the globe to expedite response and ensure timely mitigations to maintain availability.

Cloud-based defenses can be faster to implement, with some solutions allowing for mitigations in emergency situations. These solutions are also often managed by providers, adding security and DDoS experts as an extension of your team to get optimal, automated defenses.

Why a Hybrid Approach Is Ideal

By combining the strengths of on-premises and cloud-based DDoS protection solutions, organizations can receive the best coverage against most types of DDoS attacks. When employing a hybrid solution, ensuring that the individual components seamlessly integrate is paramount to maintaining strong, consistent defenses.

On-premises solutions can divert mitigation responsibilities to the cloud-based solution to intelligently mitigate attacks of all shapes and sizes. The on-premises solution remains “always-on” while the cloud-based solution is “on-demand” to divide mitigation duties and improve defenses.

How NETSCOUT Helps

NETSCOUT can feed actionable, current threat intelligence into its Arbor DDoS solutions via the ATLAS Intelligence Feed (AIF). This curated threat intelligence helps enable the automated mitigation of most DDoS attack threats with minimal human interaction.

NETSCOUT Arbor Edge Defense (AED) is a powerful on-premises solution uniquely positioned on the network edge, outside of the firewall. This enables AED to automatically block DDoS and other types of cyberattacks and to protect the firewall and other key infrastructure and applications. Arbor Cloud is a high-capacity cloud-based solution that communicates directly with AED. When volumetric attacks strike, Arbor Cloud leverages more than 15Tbps of network mitigation capacity, thanks to 16 scrubbing centers positioned around the world.

By combining both sides of the Arbor DDoS solution set, organizations can benefit from a holistic, hybrid solution that is fully integrated, allowing for the fastest, most stable mitigations available. Pair that with artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) features to detect and mitigate attacks automatically, and organizations can see why Arbor DDoS solutions have been trusted to protect the availability of the global internet for more than 25 years.

Learn more about NETSCOUT’s hybrid DDoS protection solutions.