The Business Benefits of Dedicated DDoS Mitigation

As the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) threat landscape continues to evolve, so must defenses to maintain availability. DDoS attacks are a powerful tool in a cyberadversary’s arsenal that can target anyone, especially large enterprises and service providers. The frequency of cyberattacks makes it imperative to have a thorough cybersecurity stack, and there are significant business benefits to having a dedicated DDoS mitigation solution.

The Business Impact of DDoS Attacks

DDoS attacks can cause major disruptions to business operations, leading to several tangible impacts, including:

• Financial consequences: Revenue can be lost due to downtime and unavailability of key revenue-driving services. Remediation costs can also reduce profits due to the potentially high cost of attack recovery.
• Operational disruption: Without being able to access key applications and services, employees are less productive and customers become dissatisfied.
• Strategic risk: Lack of availability can lead to reputational damage, giving competitors an advantage in the public eye.

Incidents such as these can collectively cause permanent damage to an organization. Frustrated customers may never return, leading to revenue leaving you for the competition. Consistent attacks causing disruptions can also tarnish reputation beyond repair, painting a picture of unreliability.

Limitations of Generic DDoS Solutions

Generic, or nondedicated, DDoS protection solutions can have several shortcomings. By not being tailored to the unique needs and scale of your network, these solutions can have visibility gaps that provide safe havens for adversaries. Those areas of the network that cannot be monitored give threats the perfect place to hide and avoid detection while they await the ideal time to pounce and attack. 

In addition, attack detection may not be as reliable with generic solutions. Missing smaller attacks can lead to increased downtime. This occurs when attack thresholds are too high, leading to smaller, more targeted attacks avoiding detection and being successful. 

Finally, large-scale attacks, such as volumetric DDoS attacks, can overwhelm generic defenses, rendering them ineffective and allowing adversaries to carry out successful attacks.

Key Business Benefits of Dedicated DDoS Mitigation Solutions

Having a dedicated and custom-tailored DDoS mitigation solution provides a host of business benefits. Here are eight key business benefits that can be had from adequate DDoS protection:

1. Minimized business disruption: Dedicated DDoS protection reduces downtime and preserves productivity by quickly detecting and mitigating attacks. This prevents lost sales and opportunity costs due to service outages.
2. Cost-effective risk management: By avoiding costly false positives or negatives, organizations can balance security investment and business impact. This also extends the lifespan of existing infrastructure, such as firewalls, by offloading threat detection tasks.
3. Enhanced customer experience: Maintaining availability and performance of services without adding friction, and avoiding overblocking to ensure legitimate traffic flows freely, helps improve user experience.
4. Comprehensive protection: Protecting critical assets, such as cloud or on-premises infrastructure, DNS, firewalls, and web applications, ensures comprehensive coverage and protection.
5. Advanced threat detection: Leveraging artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) to adapt to evolving attacks and detect novel threats is key. Dedicated DDoS protection solutions can offer bidirectional inspection to block both inbound and outbound malicious traffic.
6. Scalability and flexibility: Combining cloud for volumetric attack mitigation and on-premises for application-layer attacks in tandem provides a hybrid strategy for mitigating attacks of all types and sizes.
7. Integration and intelligence: Leveraging curated threat intelligence feeds can help automate detection of millions of indicators of compromise.
8. Unified management: Some dedicated DDoS protection solutions offer centralized control capabilities for visibility across diverse network environments.

How NETSCOUT Helps

For more than 25 years, NETSCOUT’s Arbor DDoS protection solution has been protecting the largest, most complex networks in the world from DDoS attacks. With dedicated, tailored solutions, Arbor DDoS protection is designed to automatically protect against most DDoS attacks. Arbor Cloud provides cloud-based protection against volumetric DDoS attacks. Arbor Edge Defense is an on-premises solution capable of protecting firewalls, DNS, and more from highly targeted attacks. For the most complex enterprise and service provider networks, Arbor Sightline and Arbor Threat Mitigation System (TMS) provide the holistic, scalable visibility needed to detect attacks across the entire distributed network. Pair these dedicated DDoS mitigation solutions with ATLAS Intelligence Feed, and you can automatically block most DDoS attacks, including the latest threats.

Learn more about NETSCOUT’s Arbor DDoS protection solution.